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

COAGULATING, COHOBATING, MACERATING, REVERBERATING 125
counts is that the paint can be arranged in the shape of a sun (or a
figure or a landscape). But from the artist’s vantage, the moment
when paint suddenly forms itself into something is always at
stake—always vexed, always sudden and mysterious. From that
point of view, distillation is the unpredictable, dangerous
agitation that immediately precedes transcendence.
SUBLIMATION
From here the metamorphoses become subtler, and many are
variations of the basic two. Sublimation is a kind of distillation of
solids: a rock, placed on a heating plate, may give off a vapor
without melting, and the vapor can be collected where it rises to
the top of the vessel. The Greeks knew this method, which they
used to tint jewelry, and they named the vessel with two
platforms (one high, one low) the kerotakis. 7 At the bottom near
the fire there might be a piece of sulfur, and at the top on a little
shelf a copper earring. As the yellow sulfur disappears, it
reappears as a purple coating on the earring. Yellow to purple: a
typical alchemical leap.
In art, sublimation is metempsychosis. A work jumps suddenly
from a place where everyone can understand it to somewhere
new, where it is lost to sight. An artist labors up a succession of
steps, one following the other. Like an alchemist plodding along
the great work, an artist can think and produce slowly, so that
each piece is exactly one step from the last. That’s the goal of
academic painting: pure control, nothing unexpected.
Sublimation is rapid, fiery, and decisive, and therefore it is also
divine. That which was solid rock is now a swirling fume, or an
invisible spirit. Sublimation is unexpected transformation, a
sudden impulsive change.
(The kerotakis, incidentally, is another link between painting
and alchemy. Originally it denoted a special palette that was
used by encaustic painters. 8 Since encaustic is based on wax and
not oil, it is necessary to keep the pigments warm so the wax
does not set until it is in place. The kerotakis was a metal palette
that rested on a bed of coals. The alchemists borrowed it from the
painters, adding a platform and a hood to trap the fumes. In
doing so they transformed one kind of sublimation into another.)