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

WHAT PAINTING IS 169
(6) Set the local colors with large brushes, making sure
they are all lighter than the original.
(7) "Easily and deftly" draw contours into them, and
"refine" them with loose reflected lights.
(8) If the colors become as dark as the original, they are
finished; but in general, maintain lighter tones than the
original painting.
(9) Next deepen the shadows, and
(10) Let the painting dry. Finish with an overall glaze (in
this case Doerner used a blue-green glaze, modified with a
rag, to indicate the nocturnal setting of the painting he was
copying).
(11) Over the glaze, paint in the "strong accents" of light
and dark.
There is no doubt that many older paintings were done in an
exacting sequence of steps. But they could not possibly have been
made as mechanically as people like Doerner suppose. In my
experience, at least, Doerner’s instructions are good for a few
passages in El Greco, but they help very little in reconstructing
any major work. Like many academicians, Doerner’s research was
exhaustive but overly systematic.
Anyone who doubts that the methods of oil painting have been
lost needs only look closely at a pre-modern painting.
COLOR PLATE II is a portion of Titian’s Venus with a Mirror. (It’s
a navel and an elbow.) Some time between the sixteenth and the
eighteenth century the painting may have been exposed to water,
or dropped, and paint chips fell off, leaving holes in the lower
arm and the side. An inept restorer tried to match the color and
fill in the holes, but he used impermanent pigments and they
faded to the color of browned butter: and worse, he used a slowdrying
medium (perhaps an oil other than linseed oil), so that the
paint ran out of the holes before it dried. The result looks like
nothing so much as suppurating wounds—not a very flattering
condition for Venus. It may have been the same restorer who
thought he could improve Titian’s sense of harmony by adding
patches of light brown glaze: one is visible here on the front of
the elbow, and there are others scattered across her body like big
pale birthmarks. To think about Titian’s technique, it is necessary
to ignore those blemishes as much as possible. What, then, can
we deduce about his method? It began with a pale brown