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

WHAT PAINTING IS 103
driest and most fiery, paint is an opaque obstruction to light, a
hunk of rock or oil crusted to the canvas surface. Monet’s series of
façades of the Rouen Cathedral are cases in point: it is as if the paint
were limestone, and Monet had rebuilt the cathedral on the
canvas itself (COLOR PLATE 6). The colors are dry and bright,
like stones baked in the sun until they glow with a palpable heat.
Sun beats down in the painting, and also in the paint itself, since
the medium is sun-thickened oil. The projecting paint casts harsh
shadows as if it were real carved stone: toward the bottom of this
detail, a ledge of paint stands in for a cornice on the actual
cathedral. But oil paint can never behave like masonry, and the
thickened remnants of the medium resist the transmutation into
rock and pull the paint into torturous shapes, bringing it forward
into sharp spikes, tearing it into troughs and ridges. The round
form in the middle is an old clock that no longer hangs on the
cathedral. 14 It had a flat, unornamented face, but Monet has
molded it in the same spikes that model the cornice. What
appears to be a flat façade around the clock, made solid by the
granular weft of the canvas, is meant to represent open-work—
stone carved in three dimensions, like a perforated screen that
opens onto the rose window several feet behind it. The paint here
is strongly unnatural, but it is obdurate and it conjures stone.
Monet painted in a pale Ochre, and then dabbed his masonry
with a fucus—a surface layer—of yellowish Sienna, and Emerald
Green, and Naples Yellow. There are even Cerulean Blue echoes
of the sky and perhaps the nearby ocean. It is as if he were
building in stone, and then painting in color. The clock itself is as
clotted as paint can be and not revert to rock: it is almost pure
pigment, worked into a grumous paste of solvent and medium.
Paint like that is annoying to handle, because it wants to be
slavered with a palette knife instead of pushed with a brush. Like
half-set glue, it clings to the brush as much as to itself. The clock
was made by herding the paint into a circle, and then jabbing at
it to dig out troughs and raise spikes. The rest of the façade was
painted hard, almost scraped the way a mason would rough out
a flat stone with a rasp. Over that foundation, the few seared
colors went on easily, more like normal paint than glue or stone.
That, as the alchemists would say, is the imbalance of Monet’s
technique: it is as far toward pure fire or pure color as oil paint
can go. The oil and solvent in it are almost strangled by the
powdered pigment—but not quite, and their last struggles are