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

138 WHAT PAINTING IS
hand, has been reduced to shards by splitting. When a material is
put out in the humid air, and falls apart, it has suffered
deliquium. Lixiviation is the separation of soluble from insoluble
substances; transudation is making a substance sweat in the
distillation bath. 18
Cooking is never far from the alchemists’ thoughts. Coction
and decoction are forms of cooking; ebulition is violent bubbling
boiling; rectification was a directed form of distillation intended
to secure the purest possible state of matter. Basil Valentine’s
Triumphal Chariot of Antimony contains an extensive analogy
between beer-making and alchemy, suggesting brewers’ parallels
for digestion, reverberation, coagulation, calcination, clarification,
and sublimation, and making alchemy into a subset of brewery. 19
There are many other parallels to cooking; a whole book could be
written on the affinities between them. 20
Alchemists sometimes got carried away naming nearly
meaningless processes, or making endless lists. According to
Ripley the twelve signs of the zodiac correspond to twelve
“gates” of alchemy. He names calcination, solution, separation,
conjunction, putrefaction, congelation, cibation, sublimation,
fermentation, exaltation, multiplication, and projection. Charles
Mackay, a sniping debunker of alchemy, said that Ripley “might
have added botheration, the most important process of all.” 21
Pasta certain point it is no longer helpful to understand painting
by thinking of specific alchemical processes. Each painter, and
each painting, finds its own way forward, and the alchemists also
made up words and methods as they went. Only the basics
remain: fixation, the drying of paint; distillation, the magical
change from paint to represented form; sublimation, the hot
invisible agent of sudden change; circulation, the airless hermetic
recycling of materials and ideas; digestion, the slow rumination
that issues in clarity; ceration, the moistening of hard metals; and
precipitation, the surprising resolution of liquid possibilities.
There is no end to the strangeness of metamorphosis. In
alchemy there is an experiment, attributed to a medieval monk,
that tells how to make gold by the unnatural offspring of two
male chickens. 22 The monk, Theophilus, tells his readers to
construct a subterranean house, all out of stone and with two tiny
openings. Through each opening they are to put one cock, and
throw in enough food to keep them alive. Eventually, “when they
have become fatted from the heat of their fatness,” they will mate