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

118 WHAT PAINTING IS
elegantly with two little pictures: for fixed and for volatile.
The sign for fixed suggests a spot of matter, sitting in a crucible.
The other suggests a dot of vapor, rising to the top of a closed
vessel. Volatile is also written as if it were a puff of smoke,
drifting and eddying in the air.
All matter, the alchemists thought, is one or the other. Water is
volatile, since it can be boiled out of a pot, leaving a white skin of
dried minerals. Honey can be boiled, leaving ash. But gold is
fixed: it is difficult to change gold, and it can seem that gold
survives all mixtures intact. It can be melted, but it cannot be
boiled away (or so the alchemists thought). It can be dissolved,
but only with some difficulty, and if it is hidden in a mixture it
will never form chemical combinations—the mixture can always
be heated, and the gold will be there at the bottom (or so the
alchemists thought). One of the aims of alchemy, and one of its
most basic metamorphoses, is to make the volatile fixed: to cut
the limbs from the lion, or clip the wings from the dragon, or
shear the feathers from the phoenix. The alchemists thought of
fixation as hobbling, chaining, and mutilation. Chop off a man’s
feet, and he will not walk far. (In other texts, by typical alchemical
paradox, amputations make more mobile, and so more volatile.)
Alchemists also symbolized fixation as —that is, mercury
shorn of its head. In one alchemical frontispiece a lion sits
demurely beside its four paws, hacked off by the alchemist’s
sword. The paws are in two neat piles.
Fixation is certainly the primary metamorphosis of painting as
well, since the liquid paints are siccative: they desiccate and
become solid. Congelation is a name for the act of fixing or
congealing, both in painting and in alchemy. Whatever else
painting is, it is the patient supervision of oil as it dries, and that
is why painters have always been so concerned about how
different media dry: whether poppyseed oil dries better than
linseed oil, whether pine oils or sunflower oils might be used
instead. It can take an expert eye to judge the differences: I have
been told hazelnut oil is the best for tempera paint, but so far I
have failed to see its distinctive properties. The endless
combinations of balsams and turpentines, soft resins such as
mastic, dammar, shellac, and sandarac, hard resins such as copal
and amber, waxes, tallows, oils (of cloves, lavender, rosemary,
elemi, cajaput, camphor): they are all meant to fine-tune the
manner in which the oil paint dries. Ideally it should not wrinkle,