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

114 WHAT PAINTING IS
impassively in ghosts of all kinds—fluoresce in red and blue
against predawn mountain skies. In Nolde’s pictures, paint is
macerated rock, dried onto the surfaces of things. It is a residue, a
stain, or a smear on the raw canvas. Paint is paint, much more
solidly and truly than in the “self-referential” gestures of
postmodern painting. It has a ponderous luminescence that the
filmy glazes of academic painters never achieved, as if the entire
world were encrusted in gleaming volcanic rock.
Unlike some works by his Expressionist followers, Nolde’s
paintings have no method in their madness. They were never
planned to be wild: they grew wild naturally, without any
thought on his part. More often than not they went wrong
somewhere en route and were either abandoned or destroyed.
Some he turned over, and painted on the back, and others he cut
up, or tore in pieces, or just crossed out in chalk. The proof that
Nolde had no method can be found in the new multivolume
edition of his collected works. There it becomes apparent that
only one in twenty paintings is a success, and the other nineteen
are ruined by overwork. If a wet thick orange is overlaid with a
thick green, the result might still be beautiful—streamers of
orange, grey, and green twined together—but if that mixture is
overlaid again with blue, and then with red, and then with
purple, and then with brown, the paint will finally succumb to
the laws of optics and become a colorless grey mess. Many of
Nolde’s paintings ended up inexpressive because he tried to make
them too expressive. The golds and magentas gave way to slushes
and sluices of muddy neutral browns, and finally the paintings
congealed into cold grey soups. Still, Nolde was genuine in his
love of paint, and he even cherished some of those last moments
before the paintings extinguished themselves. He made the best
of the suffocating tones by painting pictures of stormy seas (he
even painted on the deck of a ship sailing in midwinter), and
there are entrancing scenes of muddy streams and sodden
houses. If the paint insisted on becoming mud, he followed it as
far as he could by painting pictures of mud. But most of the time,
his ecstatic thoughts led him on without stopping, and the paint
suffered so many transformations that it finally died.
The seascape in COLOR PLATE 8 is one of a long series where
the subject is just the waves thrashing over each other, and the
paint thrashing over itself. In the best of them, Nolde manages to
stop just before the colors blend into a neutral greyish greenish