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

WHAT PAINTING IS 101
(an odd mistake by contemporary standards, since sulfur is one of
the few elements the alchemists possessed in a reasonably pure
state). They tried to get at the secret heart of it by extracting
whatever was not dry and flammable. One text says sulfur is
double (sulfur duplex), consisting of a heavy nonflammable
corporeal sulfur and a fraction that is fiery, stonelike, and
spiritual. 9 Raw sulfur could be fixed—made even more stonelike
—by distilling it with linseed oil. The calcined residue was
sometimes identified with the essence or “seed” of sulfur, and a
few alchemists even called it the Secret Fixed Sulfur of the
Philosophers.
In painting, sulfur is the pigment, the color itself, and its fiery
nature is reflected in the dryness of the colored powders that go
into oil paints. Some of the most intense colors are commercially
ground dry pigments: they are even higher in chroma than
fluorescing sales tags or boxes of laundry detergent. Earth artists
have scattered powdered pigments over stones and sand,
producing almost hallucinatory effects: the blues and reds can be
so powerful they look like optical illusions. When a powdered
pigment is mixed with only a tiny amount of binder, it remains
dry and fiery: it needs the liquid solvent to temper its color so it
can harmonize with normal colors.
Painters know paints by their bodies: “body” is a standard
painter’s term for the heft of the paint, its resilience and
sturdiness. Paint that has no body is “thin” or “lean,” and apt to
disappear into the crevices of the weave. It is insubstantial, well
suited to fool the eye into seeing through it to whatever seems to
be beyond. Other paint is called “fat,” and it adheres to the
canvas in lumps and pats, reminding even the most
absentminded viewer that the object is a painting, and not a
landscape, a face, or a disembodied abstraction. The principles of
solution and solidity, mercury and sulfur, articulate that choice.
Third of the alchemical trinity is salt. Until the middle of the
eighteenth century, salt was any solid, soluble, nonflammable
substance with a salty taste. 10 A few alchemists, such as Blaise de
Vigenère, thought hard about salt, and wrote treatises dedicated