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

COAGULATING, COHOBATING, MACERATING, REVERBERATING 137
repudiated or ruined. Painters have a maxim that if there is one
really wonderful passage in a painting, it will have to be
sacrificed to take the painting forward. That moment of
selfsacrifice brings with it a certain generative power that can
affect every other passage.
Fermentation is yeasty death. A body that burns becomes
lifeless powder, but a body that ferments rots and the room fills
with unbearable stench. As it swells, there is a strange and
fascinating rhyme between a belly distended with swampy gases
and a belly swollen with a growing child. To the alchemists
fermentation was full of digestion, pregnancy, and new life. A
vessel called the uterus was considered best for fermentation, but
alchemists also mimicked the womb by packing their sealed
vessels in manure, and even by placing vials in horses’ vaginas.
In general, vessels were sealed in imitation of the closed womb,
and opened in imitation of Caesarean section. In art this
corresponds to the inner drama of the private work, known only
to the eyes of the person creating it, and the suddenly public
work, rashly opened to public inspection. Everything private and
wordless happens in the closed studio. The work is nourished
there, kept alive and slowly grown: but there is always the
impending moment when the inner dialogue between subjective
thought and its silent embodiment will be ripped apart, and the
materialized thought will become an object of someone’s gaze.
One of the truths in the cliché that artworks are like children is
the careful cherishing of the work, and another is its quick
expulsion.
MINOR METHODS
These are the major metamorphoses, but there are dozens more.
Any painter will have favorite images or phrases to describe
transformation: the painting may be a “breakthrough” painting,
or the paint may “find its way” toward a new form, or “push up
against” something solid and invisible. In alchemy there is a whole
lexicon of forgotten and not-so-forgotten names. Explosion and
implosion also belong on the list, both of them rich in artistic
parallels. In alchemy, fusion is simply melting. Calcination is
burning until the substance becomes white powder, as in
Ripley’s Green Lion. Limation is a curious word; it means filing a
metal until it is in shards. A decrepitated metal, on the other