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

WHAT PAINTING IS 95
an experienced painter from an historian because the painter will
step up to a picture and make gestures, or trace outlines. Those
movements are not always done in any deliberate way—they are
second nature, a kind of automatic response like waving to a
friend. An historian or a critic will freeze in front of a painting, or
adopt a solid teacherly pose. A painter will walk right up to the
painting, and move a finger or an arm along with the original
artist’s gestures; an historian will either stand at a respectful
distance (it often equals the distance between a speaker’s podium
and the screen behind it), or suddenly move up close to the
painting and point at it. The painter moves with the painting, the
historian against it.
Moods are all tangled up in this as well. Any motion my body
makes throws me into a certain frame of mind: hard exercise is a
joy for the mind as much as the body, and finicky work like
threading a needle exasperates the mind as much as it frustrates
the fingers. Not all art historians ignore this: some do write about
the body, and the imagined body of the painter. But they never
take the extra step I am taking here and start talking about the
associated moods or frames of mind. It seems somehow
unreliable or too personal. Yet I wonder if there is a way not to
fall into a mood as I rehearse a painter’s gestures. Since this is a
personal book, and my academic laces are untied, I don’t mind
saying Monet makes me feel anxious. You may not agree that
some of Monet’s marks imply the tension I sense in them, but you
cannot disagree that the marks themselves are tense: they are
made with a half-controlled jitter that I experience as a mood of
tension. First my hand tenses, and then I feel tense, and it is
almost irresistible to say that Monet must have felt
something similar. Emotions cannot be excluded from our
responses to paint: these thoughts all happen too far from words
to be something we can control. Substances occupy the body and
the mind, inextricably.
Further, each medium has its own language of moods, its own
way of reporting what the artist did and felt. A lithograph bears
the memory of its stone: it has the heaviness of the lithographic
press, and the wash and grease of the lithographic chemicals. The
stone—or the ghost of it, when modern aluminum or zinc plates
are used instead of limestone slabs—conjures the body at work,
bent over the massive wood tables, hauling the stones from their
cabinets, turning the polished crank to move the press.