What Painting Is: How to Think about Oil Painting ... - Victoria Vesna

34 WHAT PAINTING IS
flank of a figure Dubuffet calls The Ceremonious One. (Note that
it’s been rotated ninety degrees; several plates in this book have
been turned so they can be reproduced as large as possible.) From
a distance, Dubuffet’s figure is a quizzical, mottled-looking
fellow, but from up close he is a roiling wreck. His skin is
puckered and split, as full of cracks and oozes as a drying patch
of mud. On the left there are great spreading blossoms of white
and purple: they are oily pigments that were put down over
watery ones. The same effect happens whenever you put a drop
of oil on the surface of water. Next time you boil spaghetti,
sprinkle the water with dried marjoram or thyme, and then add a
drop of olive oil: the oil will spread the spices out, pushing them
away and thinning itself into a film. If you look closely at the
white splotches, you can also see faint tendrils where the paint
spilled outward in little rivulets, like mudslides down a
mountain. In the middle of this detail there is a passage that
looks like bark. It is the result of putting down an oily elastic
layer over a smooth dry layer of blue: the white shrank as it dried,
split, and pulled itself apart. To the right of the bark there are
wet-in-wet experiments, where brown was dribbled into white.
The weights and oilinesses of the two colors must have been
about equal, because the brown stayed put—except that it couldn’t
mix with the white, so as the brown droplets spread out, they
couldn’t touch one another. Each rounded droplet of brown is
separated from the next by a thin mortar of white. And at the far
right margin is a huge spill, a greasy torrent that began to thicken
and set halfway down. Dubuffet didn’t control these effects,
because they are too intricate and hard to predict. But he must
have relished what he saw because he chose to leave the painting
in this state. The blotches and splatters look like natural forms—
bark, caked mud, flowers, bricks—but this is part of a human
figure, so they also mimic skin that ages, dries, and finally splits.
It is a fascinating and repulsive inventory of effects: wrinkles,
cracks, sores, liver spots, and wounds, all remade in paint. If you
stand in front of the painting, and step a foot or two farther back,
they all recede into place and the painting becomes a portrait of a
happy, disorganized-looking person with filthy clothes. But up
close, the randomness and beauty of incompatible, degenerating
substances is played out inch by inch in the paint itself. The paint
depicts skin, but it also is skin. It is rich with the feelings of
rotting, suppurating, mouldering, and desiccating. Just looking
at it is feeling age and decay. This is the mystery and attraction of
pure, nameless substances.