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

98 HOW DO SUBSTANCES OCCUPY THE MIND?
also say that marble is like skin, but that is also a bit of a dream
since marble outshines skin: it is glossier and smoother than any
skin could be. It is notions like these, and not stories about
technical excellence, that make marble an absorbing subject for a
life’s work. It is cold stone that dreams of being wood, and even
skin. A sculpture might conjure thoughts of hard chiseling with a
heavy mallet, or whittling, as if it were wood, or caressing, as if it
were skin. Any viewer can appreciate the accomplishment of
making stone into fingers and leaves, but in a more important,
bodily way, marble is about the different motions and emotions
that go with stone, wood, and skin.
It would be possible to write more along these lines, but they
are only generalizations. What makes artworks interesting is the
precise unnamable sensation particular to a single image. The
moods and meanings I have been sketching creep into our
experience without our noticing, sparking directly from the eye
to the mood without touching language at all. How do
substances speak eloquently to me without using a single word?
How do my eye and my finger know how to read paint? Partly, it
is a matter of studio experience: the more time you spend
painting (or sculpting or taking photographs) the more acutely
you will be aware of the meanings of substances. But it is also
independent of that experience. Anyone can walk up to a
painting in a museum, look at the brushstrokes, and begin to
relive them in imagination. Something about paints and colors
must work on us without consciousness being much involved.
Painting and art history do not have much more to say on the
subject. Better answers to the question, How do substances
occupy the mind?, are to be found in the old science of
substances.
Alchemical substances have meanings very different from their
modern chemical counterparts, so it would not make sense to
study alchemical lead in order to understand painter’s Lead
White. The alchemists knew hundreds of substances, but chose
just a few and made them fundamental. Sulfur, salt, mercury, and
a few others are the building blocks of much more complicated
methods. The alchemists would not have been able to believe in
such a gross simplification if it did not answer to compelling
differences between basic qualities such as wetness, dryness, or
fieriness. The bodily response to substances may be about the
same: it probably understands only very simple notions, and