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

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

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23.03.2013 Views

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.)

126 WHAT PAINTING IS FIG. 4 Apparatus for fractional distillation. From Dell’elixir vitœ.

126 WHAT PAINTING IS<br />

FIG. 4 Apparatus for fractional distillation. From Dell’elixir vitœ.

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