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

A SHORT COURSE IN FORGETTING CHEMISTRY 33
liquid rising from the crystals, or a denser layer of liquid
forming at the surface of the crystals may descend in the
flask forming a layer at the bottom.
Use illumination from the bottom and observe the
changes using different colours of light. In some
experiments, gently heat the base of the flask.… One will
see convection currents forming in the flask, and dissolved
material will be carried upwards and mix through the
whole solute.
Meditate upon this phenomenon…bearing the experience
into one’s inner world, inwardly picturing it, and allowing
this inner picture to take on its own life. Return outwardly
to the experiment in progress, and absorbing with one’s
senses the continuing events in the flask, then inwardly
digest these again. 34
Anyone who performs McLean’s simple instructions, and is
willing to forget their chemistry, will be swept into his frame of
mind. Tentative or explosive motions of one liquid through
another are irresistibly metaphors for mental states. In alchemy,
the Latin word labor is used to describe the procedures, methods,
and techniques—the daily struggle with materials. Also in Latin,
ora means prayer, and the alchemists never tired of pointing out
that labor and ora spell laboratory. As in the artist’s studio, so in
the alchemist’s laboratory: both of them mingle labor and ora.
Here in McLean’s laboratory, “meditating” and “inwardly
picturing,” labor effortlessly becomes ora.
The same kind of dynamic, swirling, unstable mixture of fluids
can also be seen in paintings, wherever an artist has tried to mingle
substances that do not go together easily. Leonardo’s Last Supper
is a crumbling ruin, the effect of media that could not harmonize
with one another. One of his paintings of the Madonna
developed terribly wrinkled skin, like paint on a car hood that is
about to crack open and fill with rust. In the twentieth century
that kind of experimentation is just as common as it was in the
Renaissance. Like Gustave Courbet a century before, the French
artist Jean Dubuffet mixed gravel and earth into his pigments,
and he experimented with the kinds of oil and water mixtures
that are bound to cause trouble in a painting. Some of his
canvasses are like still photographs of the battling fluids McLean
describes. COLOR PLATE 3 is a detail from the abdomen and left