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

120 WHAT PAINTING IS
DISTILLATION
The second most important metamorphosis is distillation, where
substances rise as vapors into the tops of vessels, and then
condense as dewy sweat and run down the sides of a tube into a
cool glass. The symbols for distillation express the beautiful
simplicity of the idea. In one symbol, , derived from an
astrological sign, the fluid boils in an egglike flask and the vapor
rises up into a curved tube and trickles down the tail toward a
collecting vessel.
In alchemy, distillation is when the substance gives up its
mundane body and becomes spirit, and in painting, it is when
the paint ceases to be paint and turns into colored light. Although
the Christian metaphors run deep and thick here, the
fundamental concept is religious in a more general sense. On an
empty canvas, a blob of yellow paint is a wet sculpture, a
hanging adhesion on the linen threads, coated in a slowly
thickening elastic skin. But if I step back far enough, it may
become a yellow sun, shining in a white sky. In that moment the
paint distills into light: it moves without my noticing from its
base oily self into an ethereal abstraction. Every painting distills
and condenses over and over as I look at it: I see first the dirty
threads and yellow stains, and then the open sky and sun. Even
the most stubbornly postmodern paintings rely on that idea—
even Sherrie Levine’s copies of Piet Mondrian’s paintings are
faint reminders of the old transcendence— and it is not much of
an exaggeration to say the entire history of Western art is a set of
variations on this underlying theme. Distillation, as I am calling
it, is what made medieval religious painting possible by allowing
worshippers to see through the thinly painted panels to the
heavenly sphere beyond. Distillation is what made romantic
painting so effective as a servant of the sublime, and it is the
dying idea that keeps the play of postmodernism going. But this
book has nothing to do with all that, since I want to keep to the
paint itself, up to the moment when it changes from blob into
sun, and not beyond.
In alchemy, distillation is transparently a metaphor for
resurrection. It means cleansing, purification, and renewal.
Alchemists lavished their attention on the transcendent meanings
of their craft, but they never lost sight of the necessity of working
in the dark stench of the laboratory. Art history does not have as