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

176 STEPLESSNESS
frightening possibility that there may be no sequence at all: the
labor may be stepless.
Alchemy and painting may have recondite and intricate
systems requiring years to master, or they may have nothing.
They may call for elaborate material, or they may need nothing.
They may be systematic branches of knowledge, where students
can march year after year up Mount Parnassus, or they may be
unteachable. In either painting or alchemy, there is a lifetime of
things to learn, and generations of wisdom to absorb: after all,
the substances are impossibly complex. But all that may not add
up to anything. Like marks on a canvas, the methods of painting
may keep adding to one. In the end there is nothing but the
painter, the paint, the brushes, and the blank canvas. More than
any other art, painting expresses the place between rule and
rulelessness in which we all find ourselves.