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

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How do substances occupy the mind?
How DO SUBSTANCES occupy the mind? How is it that looking
at a Monet painting I begin to sense a certain tenseness, feel an
itchy dissatisfaction with the body? Why does Magnasco give me
a little vertigo, and set up a swirling, diaphanous motion in my
eyes? How does Pollock exhaust me with his vacillation between
violence and gracefulness? Before I go farther into the alchemical
work, and talk about what happens after the prima materia, it is
best to think a while about the way that mere paint—mere
chemicals—can work so strongly on people’s imaginations.
The sensations I get from paint come from attending to specific
marks and the way they were made. I am using very small
details of paintings in this book to make the point that meaning
does not depend on what the paintings are about: it is there at a
lower level, in every inch of a canvas. Substances occupy the
mind by invading it with thoughts of the artist’s body at work. A
brushstroke is an exquisite record of the speed and force of the
hand that made it, and if I think of the hand moving across the
canvas—or better, if I just retrace it, without thinking—I learn a
great deal about what I see. Painting is scratching, scraping,
waving, jabbing, pushing, and dragging. At times the hand
moves as if it were writing, but in paint; and other times it moves
as if the linen canvas were a linen shirt, and the paint was a stain
that had to be rubbed under running water. Some painting
motions are like conversations, where the hands keep turning in
the air to make a point. Others are slow careful gestures, like
touching someone’s eye to remove a fleck of dirt.
Painters feel these things as they look at pictures, and they may
re-enact the motions that went into the paintings by moving their
hands along in front of the canvas as if they were painting the
pictures at that moment. In a museum, it is often possible to tell