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

WHAT PAINTING IS 75
alchemist could fix his on mechanical chemistry. I have put
this clumsily—but I am certain that you understand. 6
It’s very beautifully put, this warning about thinking too much.
It seems to me that there are only a few self-reflective texts in
practical alchemy because when substances are at work, they
can’t also be the objects of intellectual speculation. Jung couldn’t
think about the laboratory partly because he only saw substances
as psychic allegories. The same failure haunts this book, because
every notion, every concept and allegory, pushes me a little away
from the subject I am trying to describe. My book makes
Auerbach “extremely nervous” because it threatens the alchemy
—in the usual, loosely allegorical sense of that word—of his
work. It makes me less nervous, because I am no longer a
practicing painter: but I still want to stay close enough to the
“foul rag-and-bone shop” to put at least some of it into words.
The analysis of paint is a danger for any painter: those who get
too analytic about paint—who get involved in picking just the
right exotic oil, or finding the latest Nepalese drawing paper—
risk drifting away from what Auerbach calls, with unavoidable
awkwardness, the “creative identification with the subject.”
Fundamentally, thought about paint comes after paint. Jung’s
psychology could only get underway when the laboratory doors
closed; this book began for me about ten years after I left the studio.
Things only get harder to articulate when the religious
meanings come into focus, and it begins to appear that the studio
work—the labor—really is about redemption. In my experience it
is rarely apposite to talk directly with an artist about the
underlying spiritual meaning of his or her work. For any number
of reasons, religion is no longer an easy subject, and many artists
do not link it directly with themselves or their work. The buried
spiritual content of modern and postmodern art may be the great
unexplored subject in contemporary art history. Still, any book
devoted to the subject is bound to fail because it would have to
spell out so many things that the artists do not even tell
themselves. Such a book would mercilessly transgress the
boundary between the experience of paint and its meanings. It is
the same with alchemy: in both cases the underlying act is spiritual
— and especially redemptive—but the public language is only
inconsistently and weakly so. The advantage of alchemy over
theology, Jungian psychology, or art criticism for exploring