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

COAGULATING, COHOBATING, MACERATING, REVERBERATING 117
Normally there isn’t much that can be said about the exact
ways in which paint changes, or what it “wants.” The “creative
process” is vague, and so is the metaphor of metamorphosis.
Once again, alchemy is the clearest path into these questions
because alchemists nearly always understood that their art
demanded a mixture of rational control and intuitive freedom.
The alchemical substances could be partly understood, but they
also changed in unexpected ways. Some literal-minded
alchemists wrote exact formulas for their everyday elixirs and
oils, but in most cases those recipes are either trivial or wellknown.
The important recipes are always clouded or incomplete,
and though there are many reasons for that (some alchemists
were intentionally fraudulent, and others were hopelessly
confused), the incompletion was necessary so that the substances
could remain alluring and unpredictable. Alchemical
metamorphosis is not so much pre-scientific as para-scientific: it
works alongside science (from para-, meaning “beside”) by taking
some laws from the rational world of experimental procedure,
and fusing them to irrational methods designed to expose the
unpredictable properties of half-known substances.
The literature on painting is relatively mute about
metamorphosis. If you go in search of it, you will find it is
entirely taken over by largely uninteresting books on chemical
composition, artist’s techniques, and restoration. There is not
much to say about Nolde’s methods because there are so few
words to describe what happens when one color struggles with
another until they both weaken. The same is true of the older
methods: there is no critical language to describe the greenish
tempera painting, waiting for the red to cover and restore it.
Those are important meanings and states of mind, and they need
words.
The principal alchemical terms for metamorphoses are names
for changes that also happen in painting. For the alchemists as
for the painters, they are partly reasonable procedures that can be
taught and learned, and partly intuitive, mystical methods that
describe something a rational analysis cannot grasp.
CONGELATION
To the alchemists, there were two fundamentally opposed states
of matter: the fixed and the volatile. They were symbolized