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

COAGULATING, COHOBATING, MACERATING, REVERBERATING 131
isolation that somehow also muddles forward. In a typical
scenario in Beckett, nothing new has happened in years: there
have been no new events, no inspirations, nothing unexpected or
even entertaining. Yet somehow it is necessary to keep working,
and find some use for the awful leftovers of the life that has been
lived so many times over in the same room. The Unnamable ends:
“…you must say words, as long as there are any… I don’t know,
I’ll never know, in the silence you don’t know, you must go on, I
can’t go on, I’ll go on.” 9
Shit is not the only excretion that paint recalls, and the
alchemists were right to stress that ultimately it is blood—and
since blood carries the spirit, paint becomes a trope for life. An
artist who is mired in a suffocating cycle of unsuccessful
strategies is in the pelican. But it is the virtue of alchemy to point
out that self-immolation is also selfnourishment, and the
alchemists valued circulation as a strengthening agent: each time
the substance is boiled away, it is returned to itself in a purer
state. They thought that the very act of distillation would
enhance the substance—never mind that modern science would
say nothing changes in the pelican. In the same way, wonderful
things can be accomplished in the studio when it is shut off from
the outside world. Working again and again with the same
wretched pigments, the same frowzy brushes, the same paintstained
walls, can be exactly what is needed to bring something
worthwhile to life. The British painter Frank Auerbach has
worked in a single room for decades, for the most part without
dusting or rearranging anything. Imagine the resonance that
every stain and particle must finally accrue. Critics who say that
artists need experience of the world do not know about the
pelican, and the springs of strength that come from the body and
lead back into it.
DIGESTION
The alchemists took digestion literally, and tried for the same heat
as a stomach or—since they were interested in nourishment, and
not just food—a womb. The substance to be digested was put in a
sealed vessel, and the vessel was heated at a constant warmth—
either in a bed of warm sand, or a hot bath, or a crate of rotting
manure. Sometimes it was just laid out in the sun, and the
process was called insolation. The sign for digestion suggests