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

74 THE MOULDY MATERIA PRIMA
The act of making, labor, was the prayer, ora. What counted in the
laboratory was the wordless work. The theoalchemists such as
Georg von Welling, the ecstatic prophets like Heinrich Khunrath,
the philosophic mystics like Michael Maier, and even the
“scientific” psychologists like Jung all came afterward, with their
heavy interpretations in tow. It is essential to remember that no
matter how crucial religious meanings were to the alchemists,
there are no books written in the laboratory that speak about them.
At the moment of making, the act is everything. Afterward, there
is plenty of time—even centuries—to try to figure out what it all
meant.
The exact same silence is the essential trait of the studio. There
is a wonderful liquid complexity of thoughts that accompany
painting, but they are all in, and of, and through the paint. (That
is not to say an artist might not think about anything, from Wall
Street to Jung: but what is engrossing about painting is the act
itself, and everything else is a distraction, or a way of not
thinking too directly about the unnerving importance of the very
next brushstroke.) The love of the studio is an unreflective,
visceral love, and for that reason the ideas I am setting out in this
book risk being too explicit, too much dissected, too open to
conscious thought. When I was working on these opening
chapters, I sent copies to a number of people—painters, chemists,
alchemists, historians of art and chemistry. Among the responses
was a very thoughtful letter from Frank Auerbach. He says he
feels the book is right, and yet “there is something else,
something much rarer”:
An Irish woman attending church and a sermon on “Family
Life” was heard to say, on leaving the church, “I wish I
knew as little about it as he does.” I feel what you say does
not betray or offend my experience of painting. Everything
you say is true to my experience.
But—the whole subject makes me extremely nervous. As
soon as I become consciously aware of what the paint is
doing my involvement with the painting is weakened. Paint
is at its most eloquent when it is a by-product of some
corporeal, spatial, developing imaginative concept, a
creative identification with the subject. I could no more fix
my mind on the character of the paint than—it may be—an