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

5
Coagulating, cohobating, macerating,
reverberating
EMIL NOLDE, the original German Expressionist, had a wild
way with paint. Where an academic painter would have begun
cautiously with a smooth thin underpainting, Nolde started right
off with opaque paint at full strength. Instead of planning where
each color would go, he worked impulsively, changing his mind
in midstream, piling color on color in thick impastos, or scraping
the brush back and forth on the dry canvas long after it had given
up its pigment. If the paint became too thick and wet and yet was
still all wrong, he did not swab off the excess with a cloth, or put
the canvas aside to let it dry. Usually he just kept painting, until
the thin paste became an unmanageable oily sea. Some of his
pictures look like cracked molds for bas-reliefs, and others are
haggard where the dry brush has scratched and rubbed to get the
last morsel of pigment. Even though he knew the academic
protocols, Nolde didn’t care about fat and thin paint, or the slow
patient building-up from dark toward light, or even the proven
logic of color combinations. He covered greens with oranges, and
violets with yellows, and he tried over and over to do something
every beginning painter knows is hopeless—he shoveled
brushloads of white into wet blues and blacks, hoping to lighten
them. (Blues can’t be lightened that way: the white disappears
endlessly into the dark.)
Nolde’s process was unruly, but the results are sometimes
wonderful beyond anything the later Expressionists managed.
Deep orange suns, embedded in thick magenta clouds, shine
darkly on brackish waters. Cool forests, shot through with bluish
green treetrunks, shimmer with streaks of dirty yellow and heavy
brown. Shining sunflowers hang their plastered faces in gardens
filled with dense Viridian and purple, shadowed under bluish
skies. Spooks and specters—Nolde believed naturally and