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

110 HOW DO SUBSTANCES OCCUPY THE MIND?
processes are arrangements and transmutations of substances: but
sometimes they also are substances.
Here it is in paint: a Rembrandt self-portrait of 1659, which I
have photographed in slightly raking light (COLOR PLATE 7).
Rembrandt is well-known for the buttery dab of paint that he
sometimes puts on the ends of the noses of his portraits, and this
nose is certainly greasy and has its little spot of white. But touches
like that do not stand alone: when Rembrandt was interested in
what he was doing, as he was here, he coated entire faces in a
glossy, shining mud-pack of viscid paint. The skin is damp with
perspiration, as if he were painting himself in a hot room, and he
slowly accumulated a slick sheen of sweat. It is impossible to
ignore the strangeness of the paint. If I looked at my face in the
mirror and saw this, I would be horrified. The texture is much
rougher than skin, as if it is all scar tissue. As a painter works, the
shanks of the brushes become repositories for dried paint, and
flecks of that paint become dislodged and mix with fresh paint,
rolling around on the canvas like sodden tumbleweeds. They are
all over this face, forming little pimples or warts wherever they
end up. (There is a large one halfway up the nose.) Among
contemporary artists, Lucien Freud has made an entire technique
out of these rolling flakes and balls, and he lets them congregate
in his figures’ armpits and in their crotches. 29 In short, the face is
a wreck, much more disturbing than the unnaturally smooth faces
that most painters prefer.
Although historians tend to see Rembrandt’s method as an
attempt at naturalism, it goes much farther than portrait
conventions have ever gone, then or since. Consider what is
happening in the paint, aside from the fact that it is supposed to
be skin. Paint is a viscous substance, already kin to sweat and fat,
and here it represents itself: skin as paint or paint as skin, either
way. It’s a self-portrait of the painter, but it is also a self-portrait
of paint. The oils are out in force, like the uliginous oozing waters
of a swamp bottom. The paint is oily, greasy, and waxy all at once
—even though modern chemistry would say that is impossible. It
sticks: it is tacky and viscid like flypaper. It has the pull and
suction of pine sap. Over the far cheek, it spreads like the
mucilage schoolchildren use to glue paper, resisting and rolling
back. On the nose—it’s rude, but appropriate—the paint is semisolid,
as if the nose were smeared with phlegm or mucus. On the
forehead, it looks curdled, like gelatin that is broken up with a