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

COAGULATING, COHOBATING, MACERATING, REVERBERATING 115
brown. Here he has been painting straight from the tube with
gobs of creamy Viridian, Lead White, Chromium Green, Lamp
Black, purple, and brown. The seas must have been racing,
because he paints up and down, and then slurs the colors by
dashing the brush across sideways. Already the bottom and the
top of the scene are lost to heavy impastos of impenetrable
opaque color, and the horizon—the key to whatever space there
is left in the picture—is in danger: it is overburdened by
incompatible hues, and with one or two more brushstrokes it
would lose its focus and fall into a flat curtain of static grey.
Painting is the art of metamorphosis, and Nolde is its wildest
student—never thinking, never planning, never pausing long
enough to formulate a strategy. He is the opposite of the careful
didactic plotters in the French Academy, who made painting into
a professional activity by giving it a sophisticated nomenclature
and a battery of methods. In the French practice, which was
generalized throughout Europe in the eighteenth century,
painting proceeds according to a plan, beginning with drawing
and progressing through sketches and studies and
underpaintings and layers and glazes, and culminating with
delicately concocted varnishes. It was an apotheosis of systematic
learning. The French Academy tried to revive and preserve earlier
methods that were thought to have been used in the Renaissance,
and they were right in many ways: Renaissance paintings
generally did demand some advance planning, and they did
proceed step by step. A tempera painting, for instance, begins
with the figures all in green. When the green dries the painter
goes over it again in translucent red, and a flesh tone is
miraculously produced where the green shines weakly through
the red. Having done that myself I can testify to how unexpected
it is, and how difficult it can be to have to look at a greenish cast
of characters, and try to think ahead to what the colors of the
finished painting will be. Many old tempera paintings have been
over-cleaned, so the figures are greenish or bluish instead of
rosy. Sassetta’s madonna, COLOR PLATE 1, is an example: her
face may have been slightly cool, to indicate her heavenly status,
but it has been made somewhat cold, like a polished emerald, by
restorers who dabbed away the finishing layer of red. The depth
of the underlying green can be judged by the dark bluish cracks
that have opened in the madonna’s skin. In past centuries
painters routinely had to exercise a force of imagination as they