What Painting Is: How to Think about Oil Painting ... - Victoria Vesna
What Painting Is: How to Think about Oil Painting ... - Victoria Vesna
What Painting Is: How to Think about Oil Painting ... - Victoria Vesna
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34 WHAT PAINTING IS<br />
flank of a figure Dubuffet calls The Ceremonious One. (Note that<br />
it’s been rotated ninety degrees; several plates in this book have<br />
been turned so they can be reproduced as large as possible.) From<br />
a distance, Dubuffet’s figure is a quizzical, mottled-looking<br />
fellow, but from up close he is a roiling wreck. His skin is<br />
puckered and split, as full of cracks and oozes as a drying patch<br />
of mud. On the left there are great spreading blossoms of white<br />
and purple: they are oily pigments that were put down over<br />
watery ones. The same effect happens whenever you put a drop<br />
of oil on the surface of water. Next time you boil spaghetti,<br />
sprinkle the water with dried marjoram or thyme, and then add a<br />
drop of olive oil: the oil will spread the spices out, pushing them<br />
away and thinning itself in<strong>to</strong> a film. If you look closely at the<br />
white splotches, you can also see faint tendrils where the paint<br />
spilled outward in little rivulets, like mudslides down a<br />
mountain. In the middle of this detail there is a passage that<br />
looks like bark. It is the result of putting down an oily elastic<br />
layer over a smooth dry layer of blue: the white shrank as it dried,<br />
split, and pulled itself apart. To the right of the bark there are<br />
wet-in-wet experiments, where brown was dribbled in<strong>to</strong> white.<br />
The weights and oilinesses of the two colors must have been<br />
<strong>about</strong> equal, because the brown stayed put—except that it couldn’t<br />
mix with the white, so as the brown droplets spread out, they<br />
couldn’t <strong>to</strong>uch one another. Each rounded droplet of brown is<br />
separated from the next by a thin mortar of white. And at the far<br />
right margin is a huge spill, a greasy <strong>to</strong>rrent that began <strong>to</strong> thicken<br />
and set halfway down. Dubuffet didn’t control these effects,<br />
because they are <strong>to</strong>o intricate and hard <strong>to</strong> predict. But he must<br />
have relished what he saw because he chose <strong>to</strong> leave the painting<br />
in this state. The blotches and splatters look like natural forms—<br />
bark, caked mud, flowers, bricks—but this is part of a human<br />
figure, so they also mimic skin that ages, dries, and finally splits.<br />
It is a fascinating and repulsive inven<strong>to</strong>ry of effects: wrinkles,<br />
cracks, sores, liver spots, and wounds, all remade in paint. If you<br />
stand in front of the painting, and step a foot or two farther back,<br />
they all recede in<strong>to</strong> place and the painting becomes a portrait of a<br />
happy, disorganized-looking person with filthy clothes. But up<br />
close, the randomness and beauty of incompatible, degenerating<br />
substances is played out inch by inch in the paint itself. The paint<br />
depicts skin, but it also is skin. It is rich with the feelings of<br />
rotting, suppurating, mouldering, and desiccating. Just looking<br />
at it is feeling age and decay. This is the mystery and attraction of<br />
pure, nameless substances.