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

96 HOW DO SUBSTANCES OCCUPY THE MIND?
Lithographs speak about the crayon’s crumbly grip, the water
pooling across the plate, the furious polishing of gum arabic and
acid. Each lithograph has something different to say about the
body that made it. Some are careful drawings, done with slow
gestures. “Chalk lithographs” pretend they are dry pastel
drawings. Others are inundations of fluids. Toulouse-Lautrec
spattered ink across his plates by flicking a small brush with his
fingernail. Memories of stones and waters and moving bodies
mingle with the thoughts that went into the making. Gentle
movements mean calmness. Heavier stones and wilder gestures
imply a more turbulent mind. The meaning seems to travel like
an electric current, sparking from the artist’s body to the
chemicals, and from there to the eye of the viewer.
An engraving is a story of the tiny hard scratches that made it,
the squinting eye that peered to follow them, the pinched
movements of the hand, and the back bent over the work. From
there it is only a short gap—the electricity of meaning arcs across
it—to the feelings that accompany those bodily configurations. No
matter what they depict, engravings are about having the
patience to sit in one position for hours, letting the wrist or the
fingers turn white with the pressure of the plate or its lead-filled
cushion. An engraving is a monument to a certain act of
determination, in the same way as a bank of burning votive
candles is evidence of devotion. Each engraving speaks a little
differently about its making. But we can hear the subtle
voices because it is our fingers that curl around the small round
handle of the burin, and our arms that begin to burn from the
constant pressure against the plate.
In photography the factual distance of a photograph echoes the
steel and plastic camera that was manipulated to make it. A
photographer can infer the settings of the camera from the
photograph, and sometimes also guess the kind of camera. The
grain of the print tells what kind of film it was, and how it was
developed, and the tones of the print tell about the paper and the
developing process. The constant heaviness of the camera, its
smooth surfaces lightly greased by the fingers, the feeling of the
knurled aperture ring, the grainy ground-glass in the finder, the
corrosive chemicals of the darkroom, and the flashing searchlight
of the enlarger, all mingle in the viewer’s mind together with the
photograph. My experience of any photograph is blurred together
with my thoughts about clutching the camera, and the peculiar