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

102 HOW DO SUBSTANCES OCCUPY THE MIND?
to it. Vigenère says salt is “biting, acrid, acidic, incisive, subtle,
penetrating, pure and clean, fragrant, incombustible,
incorruptible…crystalline, and as transparent as air.” 11 Ina more
prosaic sense, salt was said to be whatever remains after
evaporation, or forms crystals. Salt crusts can be made by
evaporating salt water or tears, and saltpeter or nitre (sodium or
potassium nitrate, NaNO 3 and KNO 3) appear as a salty crusts on
the surface of rocks—hence its name salpetra, meaning rock salt.
Salt is an “earthly principle,” with power to coagulate and
preserve. 12 It is a bounder, a delimiter (terminator) of substances,
since it is itself the sterile end product of many reactions. Salt is
the embalmer, the agent that assures corporeal stability. 13
For painting, salt is the finished product: the dried crust of
paint on the canvas, the inert product of the reactions that created
the painting. Paint on an old painting is as petrified as the salt
that ends alchemical experiments. It is the place where the strife
of liquid and solid, inflammable and nonflammable, colorless
and colored, female and male, come to their resolution.
The two antithetical principles of solvent and pigment are
commonplaces in the studio, and artists are aware of the need to
balance them. In my own experience at least, it rarely makes
sense to think of the components of paint as male and female the
way the alchemists pictured sulfur and mercury, though it does
help to think of them as antagonists or partners. Artists have to
negotiate between pigments and their solvents, and they are
often conceived as opposites. But the idea that there may be a
third term, and that it is the dried paint itself, is entirely new to
painting—as it was to alchemy when Paracelsus promoted salt
and invented the alchemical Trinity. The alchemical triad
suggests that painting works toward a balance between color,
fluid, and “salt,” or—to put it in studio terms—between the
powdered color, the colorless solvent, and the final dried product
on the canvas.
In practice, these generalities resolve into sharply different
cases depending on what substances are being used. A passage
done with stand oil and Burnt Sienna—that is, a rich reddish
brown in a sticky gloss medium—will dry into a deep shadow.
Another passage painted in benzene and cold grey, will produce
a shallow, brittle-looking surface. At its most watery and
colorless, paint is like a glass of water spilled onto the canvas,
sinking into its threads and evaporating into a faint stain. At its