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

COAGULATING, COHOBATING, MACERATING, REVERBERATING 123
twilight combinations, like this one where the collection vessels
are lined up like piglets suckling at their mother’s teats (Figure 5).
A modern chemist might say that only the most infinitesimal
differences between compounds could ever be separated this
way, and even so it would be too unreliable to ever produce
dependable results. The alchemists also distilled their substances
over and over, hoping to discover different forms of the same
substance. They called that process cohobation, and they had a
beautiful symbol for it: showing two cycles, with a zigzag
suggesting more to follow. (It’s also possible to think of Fig. 5 as a
symbolic diagram, and not an actual piece of laboratory
equipment, in which case it hints at how many times the
distillation must be repeated.)
Illogical apparatuses made distillation into a mystery. It was
fitting that distillation should be at least partly unknowable, as
long as it was a metaphor for transcendence. The English
Renaissance alchemist George Ripley describes an experiment in
which a thickened, crystallized mixture of lead oxide and glacial
acetic acid—he calls it his Green Lion—is put in a flask and
distilled. When it is heated, the Green Lion gives off white fumes
which condense into a clear liquid, just the way steam would fill
a glass container and condense back into clear liquid. But then
all of a sudden there is an ustulation: the remaining mixture
puffs up to three times its height and solidifies into a brittle white
mass, like a glass sponge. It is a startling effect, and it happens
with no warning. If the sponge is heated further, the collection
vessel will fill with a strong-smelling liquid that Ripley calls his
Blessed Liquor. The sponge can be broken down, and if
powdered remnants of it are heated again, they will turn black.
Then, when they are taken out of the still and touched by a
match, a beautiful rainbow of colors glides across their surface
and is fixed in place. I have a sample I made several years ago;
even now, it glows with burnt-out reds and oranges. 6 It’s the
kind of beautiful and utterly unexpected chain of transformation
that painters also know: the moments when it seems one thing is
absolutely certain, and then something entirely unexpected
happens instead. Even the most unpromising leftovers, like
Ripley’s black powder, can be ignited into gorgeous displays.
For people who care only about what paint can depict,
distillation is the rudimentary step that all painters make in order
to represent anything. It’s the business of painting, and what