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

106 HOW DO SUBSTANCES OCCUPY THE MIND?
Tin is shrieking and inconvertible
Mercury exhales vapors
Quicksilver is the mother
The moon is silver, eternal and stable
In silver there is a provision for everything:
This is the burning people
There is no hope of pure balance, no electrum with miraculous
powers. A painting is a conversation between its substances, and
it will always be a little imbalanced. Oils and colors are not coequals,
but “burning people,” unable to converge on a single
purpose. Some colors will be more strident than others; some
parts will liquefy while others congeal; some marks will be harsh
and others flaccid. It is the conversation itself that makes paint
eloquent, the “thinking in paint” as Damisch says. A perfect
electrum would be dead.
So far I have been using the word “substance” whenever I can,
and avoiding “element” unless I mean modern chemistry or the
four Greek elements. Alchemists talk about substances and
elements, and they also talk about “principles”—mercury, sulfur,
salt. All of them (substances, elements, principles) are
fundamentally chemicals. But why should a substance, in the
sense that I mean it here, be only a chemical? The Greek elements
also have “qualities”—hot, moist, dry, cold—and artists also care
about oiliness, runniness, and powderiness. Couldn’t they be
“substances” in an artist’s mind, just like linseed oil or Burnt
Sienna?
There is a difficult and even profound question lurking here. Is
a substance going to be restricted to something that could be on
Ğābir’s list—a metal, a stone, a salt, and so forth? Can a mixture,
like an alloy of all the metals, also be a substance? If water can be
a substance, then what about phlogiston, or even solubility, or
liquidity? Isn’t “cold” substantial enough to be a substance? And
most important: do our intuitive responses to the world care
about these kinds of distinctions? Perhaps in my uncognized
reactions to the world (I hesitate to say my unconscious
reactions, since I don’t mean anything so doctrinaire), “cold” and
“oil” are equals, instead of one being an adjective and the other a
noun.