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

WHAT PAINTING IS 91
arm’s length away: there are large blurry patches of beige or flesh
tone and white (none are present in this detail), linear black
streamers with their bulbous ends, and finer strands and loops.
Closer in there is a fourth level of detail, made of fine spray and
uncontrolled drippings. In this detail there is a passage of very thin
snaking white threads, like overcooked angel’s hair pasta, and
droplets of beige, part of a widely dispersed spray. The smallest
droplets went down last, so they lie on top of every other mark—
notice the beige drop that sits squarely in the middle of the
straight black diagonal, splaying it slightly where it hit.
In Pollock’s paintings, pigments have to be called “flesh” or
“beige” instead of, say, Ochre or Sienna, because he used
commercially mixed colors. The actual names would have been
more like “Fawn Beige” or “Caravan.” In this sample there are
five colors: black, beige, a darker greyish brown, white, bluegreen,
and aluminum. The aluminum is the most unusual, since
it is a shiny metal-based pigment; it is visible toward the bottom,
just right of center.
Thinking of the painting as a layered sequence, it may seem as
if Pollock was actually working toward a kind of order, so that the
painting would reveal its creation, step-by-step, to a careful
investigator. But Pollock was desperately interested in avoiding
the normal structure of drawing and painting. It is rarely possible
to follow a stream of paint as it winds its way across the canvas
(as museum docents often advise visitors to do). Wherever such a
layer became too obvious, he obfuscated it, tangling it back into
the pattern as if he were stitching a stray thread. Where marks
threatened to become too clear, Pollock let a messy beige drip fall
just on top of them, or he held the brush still while it spun a
thread of paint, piling up like syrup on a pancake. Here the white
paint has been dropped that way into the wet black, falling on
top of itself and sinking in. I imagine Pollock taking special
pleasure in details like the broken squiggles of white at the lower
left. Just left of the vertical white ribbons, there are several
disjointed white pieces: a Z shape, a dot just above it, and two
C’s, one of them backwards. They do not add to a
comprehensible human gesture: they are effectively cut off,
floating inside faint halos of white.
It may be that what Pollock feared, and wanted most to
destroy, was the long continuous contour that would imply a
human figure. Art historians have written about Pollock’s desire