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

COAGULATING, COHOBATING, MACERATING, REVERBERATING 119
shrink, or discolor, and it should remain viscid long enough to be
worked but not so long that the painting cannot be packaged and
sold. Acrylics could only be successful in the twentieth century,
when painters are more likely to be impatient. In past centuries,
acrylic would have seemed to dry far too quickly.
And alchemists were right to imagine fixation as a violent
process. Imagination is fluid, or it wants to be, and the very act of
painting is an act of violence against the liquidity of our thoughts.
A painting is frozen, and its permanence is very much unlike our
evanescent ideas. That is one of painting’s powers, since the
stillness of a painting can set the mind free in a remarkable way—
paintings give us license to reflect in ways that volatile arts, such
as movies and plays, cannot. A film bombards the senses with
new configurations, while a painting remains still, waiting for us
to dream the changes it might possess. But for the painter, the
continuous partial freezing of each day’s work is also something
unpleasant, like a necrosis creeping through healthy tissue.
A fixed element in a work, such as a dried passage where the
painting is effectively finished, can be a cornerstone around
which the work is constructed. It is necessary, but it also hurts. It
is often possible to look at a painting and guess which passage
was fixed early in the process. It may be a face, or a beautiful
passage of drapery, or a brilliant gestural mark: usually it is
whatever is so obviously successful that the painter could not
bear to efface it even when the whole painting changed around it
until its very existence became a luxury. At first the perfect place
in the image is a happy discovery, what in French is called a
trouvaille, and then as the painting gathers around it, it wears out
its welcome and becomes an annoyance. Often, too, it is possible
to see paintings where the perfect place, prematurely fixed, has
outlived its value and continues to exist only as a fossil of some
earlier notion of what the picture might have been. Paintings tell
the story of their creation that way. The paint gathers around the
one fixed spot like the nacre of a pearl around a piece of grit.
Anything permanent in the imagination is also an obstruction, an
ossification of the freedom of thought. Like a bursa in a shoulder
joint or a sand grain in a clam, it attracts accretions that try to
smooth it out and make it less painful. The painting swirls
around the fixed spot, protecting and enclosing it like a bandage.
But thoughts rub against it, and it aches.