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

WHAT PAINTING IS 87
half-light and emerge with their colors changed. A piece of clean
grey cadmium (Cd), dipped into the liquid, will eventually turn
yellowish or golden, and tin (Sn) will blanch, taking on the look
of white gold (called asem). 30 People who work in bronze casting
know the stomach-turning fumes of liver of sulfur, which tints
bronze in the same way. Even the most unpromising jar of
industrial waste can yield beautiful results.
In painting, this materia prima is the full chromatic spectrum of
the palette in all its force and incoherence. Kandinsky described
it most eloquently when he remembered the first box of paints he
got as a child. The paints flowed from the tubes, he said,
jubilant, sumptuous, reflective, dreamy, absorbed in
themselves, with deep seriousness or a mischievous
sparkle…those strange beings we call colors came out one
after another, living in and for themselves, autonomous,
endowed with all the qualities needed for their future
autonomous life… At times it seemed to me that whenever
the paintbrush…tore away part of that living being which is
a color, it gave birth to a musical sound.
For Kandinsky colors were the chaos itself, the original source of
energy and life. He loved
the strife of colors, the sense of balance we have lost,
tottering principles, unexpected assaults, great questions,
apparently useless striving, storm and tempest, broken
chains, antitheses and contradictions, these make up our
harmony…Legitimate and illegitimate combinations of
colors, the shock of contrasting colors, the silencing of one
color by another, the checking of fluid color spots by
contours of design, the overflowing of these contours, the
mingling and the sharp separation of surfaces, all these
open great vistas of purely pictorial possibility. 31
This is the churning, engrossing flux that Zosimos envisioned,
full of sharp detail and mutating possibilities. In art, colors and
pigments can also be a deep, poisonous addiction. Kandinsky
probably felt them too intensely, and it led him into a wandering
mysticism. No one sees Kandinsky’s paintings the way he
insisted they should be seen: no one reads the occult personality