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

COAGULATING, COHOBATING, MACERATING, REVERBERATING 133
only difference between them was white. Digestive areas are
places where things almost are. They can be reminiscent of the
monotony of house paint, and they can also adumbrate the full
variety of an abstract composition or an imaginary landscape.
But they hold everything in suspension, letting the forms draw
them-selves almost into clarity.
CERATION
Some substances are skin-like—waxy, pliant, glossy, smooth—but
most are not. Alchemists valued the rare substances that behave
like skin or flesh, and they made things waxy (in the process
called ceration) and soapy (saponification) in order to mimic
living tissue. Ceration was a kind of loosening, where the hard
metals and bitter salts became moist and took on water.
Normally, soap is made from animal fat, so that saponification
only changes one organic thing into another; but it can also be
made from metals: there are iron soaps, aluminum soaps, and
even magnesium and strontium soaps. A sudden change into
human skin would be inconceivable, but a slight chemical
softening can begin the melting that might rescue the metallic
back into the world of the human. Soap and wax are halfhuman:
they are halfway conditions, on the path to genuine life.
In paint, too, it is essential to make the pigment pliable—not
just so that it can be easily spread with a brush, but so that it
recalls the texture and feel of human life. In the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries painters wanted their paint “buttery” or
“creamy.” (That sense of “cream” comes from Continental and
British creams, which are much thicker than American cream.
French crème fraiche and British jarred cream are more like
American pudding or yogurt.) Those are good consistencies for
most paintbrushes, but they are also appetizing, and pleasing to
the touch. When the object is to make something living, it helps
to begin with half-living ingredients. Rembrandt’s textures are
not appetizing, but they are all in the range of the human and
organic. Even today, when some painters find the words
“buttery” and “creamy” old-fashioned or unhealthy, paint has
lost a little of its organic appeal. Painters sometimes call a paint
“fat,” but even that word is less common now than fifty years
ago. The loss of those words is more important than it seems.