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

116 WHAT PAINTING IS
worked, because their transformations went by slow stages. An
unfinished painting would never look like the final product until
the last moment; it would be deliberately too light, or too warm,
or too green. At the beginning, Sassetta’s painting would have
had a blank where the figures are, and a mat of red clay all
around. The clay, called bole, supports the gold leaf, and takes
the impressions made by the artist’s punches when he decorates
the halos. In this painting, the punches have held up well— one
set serves as decoration in her collar—but the gold is abraded
and the red bole shows through. Clothes would have been done
separately, often in multiple layers to build up their density. That
kind of planning has long since vanished. From the
Impressionists onward paint has been allowed to transform more
rapidly, and from the Expressionists onward, there have been
virtually no rules or restraints. Now anything is possible, and a
picture might become suddenly beautiful or be ruined in a
moment.
These two possibilities—the slowly worked-out plan, and the
impetuous rush—are different ways of managing
metamorphosis. Conservative painters and teachers mourn the
loss of “real” technique, but the two are just opposite ends of the
same spectrum of transformation. As painters say, the paint seems
to have a mind of its own– it “wants” to do certain things, and it
“resists” the painter. Some artists have tried to discipline paint, to
learn its inner rules, and to control it from a position of
knowledge. Others have learned to let paint do what it wants, so
that painting becomes a collaboration between the artist’s desire
and the unpredictable tendencies of the paint. In the first
category belong the majority of premodern painters, the
academicians, conservators and chemists, technically-minded
artists, color theorists and chemical engineers. In the second
belong the Expressionists and Neo-Expressionists, and the
majority of contemporary painters. They are agreed on one
principle: painting is metamorphosis. When people say art is
alchemy, they usually mean it involves metamorphoses that can
only be partly understood. Chemistry can only go so far, and
then intuition, creation, skill, genius, imagination, luck, or some
other intangible has to take over. Alchemy is the generic name
for those unaccountable changes: it is whatever happens in the
foggy place where science weakens and gives way to ineffable
changes.