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

WHAT PAINTING IS 109
qualities, principles, and even elements. What matters in any
specific instance is what is occupying the mind: a certain oil
varnish may be engaging because it is unusually viscous, in
which case a quality counts as a substance. A particular stone
might be of interest because it is powdery, so that the principle of
sulfur or the property of inflammability comes to the forefront.
There is no reason to put qualities or principles on a different
footing from substances, just as there is no reason to refer
substances back to elements and chemical formulae. For the same
reason I am skeptical about distinguishing between what
philosophers call ideas and observables. If the purpose is to
understand paint, then there is no utility in making a sharp line
between concepts and chemicals: a concept can be a substance in
the mind just as a chemical is a substance in the world.
Substances occupy the mind as concepts, and concepts occupy
the world as substances. Linseed oil on the palette is
indistinguishable from linseed oil in my mind. Philosophically,
there are many good reasons to say otherwise; but in terms of
experience, substances settle in the mind and act on the thoughts
exactly as if they were principles of thinking, and the ways I
think migrate outward and settle in the oils and paints exactly as
if they were solid things. Thinking in painting is thinking as
paint.
Alchemists do distinguish substances from processes, but even
that basic distinction is never quite secure. The ecstatic Heinrich
Khunrath confuses ideas, spirits, and substances continuously. In
one book, talking about the spirit of God, he says it must be a
“spiritually fired water, or a watery fiery spirit, or a fiery spiritous
water” (Geistfewrigem Wasser/wässerigem fewrigem Geiste/oder
fewrigem GeistWasser). 26 There is no way to tell, and no reason to
try. Since Heraclitus, it’s been a commonplace that things are in
continuous flux, but alchemical thinking opens a much more
radical possibility: that flux itself may be a thing. The historian
Conrad Hermann Josten is probably right when he says that in
some contexts, a paired eagle and serpent in an alchemical
picture may “represent the Philosopher’s Mercury as well as its
sublimation and the Stone itself,—the matter, the method, and
the result.” 27 Dee’s “hieroglyphic monad” can be
“hieroglyphically considered” in different ways so it is at once a
sign for substances, their transmutations, and the stone. 28 Artistic