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

172 STEPLESSNESS
that studio instruction only provides hints and strategies.
Perhaps a great painting can happen suddenly, with no planning
or working by stages.
A painting student who follows Doerner or one of the other
man uals soon encounters this dilemma, since any given step is
either trivial (such as “paint a white layer of gesso on the panel”)
or so large as to encompass the entirety of skill and experience in
one rule (as in “complete the figures by painting down into the
darks and up into the lights”). Even the supposed glazes and
grisaille underpaintings can be omitted in many cases with no
visible effect. Restorers do not try to simulate the layers when
they patch damaged paintings: they just match the overall look
of the paint, and fill it in with a single layer. The thirteen or so
layers in the section of Cima’s painting would be replaced by an
average tone. Many times force of habit, and reverence for the
supposed knowledge of Old Masters, leads historians to
postulate layers that have no effect on the eye and may very well
not have existed. In Cima’s painting, other portions might well
be simpler, and still others more complex: there might not have
been a uniform method, applied across the painting or even
across one portion of it.
When painting is effectively done without separate steps—as
virtually all modern painting is, beginning with the
Impressionists—then there is very little that can be said about its
method. The unease that many parents feel when their children
set out to study art is partly because they sense that there is no
systematic technical instruction in contemporary art schools. In a
large sense, that is correct because there is no longer a succession
of definite kinds of information that must be learned in a certain
order. Painting might take years of preparation and experience,
but a truly great painting might also happen in a few minutes of
intense work. Artists first became aware of this around the turn of
the century, and Whistler is the one who made it famous by
proclaiming that his patrons paid for the lifetime of experience
that went into the painting, not the half hour it took to paint it. In
the same vein the German Impressionist Max Liebermann said,
“there is no Technique. There are as many techniques as there are
painters.” 7 In the twentieth century painting is a one-step process
since the “steps” all blend into one another, and there are rarely
more than two or three actually distinct layers that might be
separately described. To paint is to work continuously on an