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

76 THE MOULDY MATERIA PRIMA
spiritual meaning in art is that it is a sister discipline. Alchemy is
also shy, and it also keeps to substances and lets them silently fill
with meaning rather than blurting out what seems most
precious.
Yet redemption is a root idea of this book, and it is a principal
reason why the starting-point of alchemy or painting must be
perceived as more than a brute lump of matter. In artistic terms,
it has to seem potentially expressive, and in alchemical terms, it
must have the spark that signals an incipient spirit. Because those
requirements are both crucial and vague, it is no surprise that the
materia prima goes under many names. Often the alchemists call it
lead, meaning not so much the chemical substance lead as the
heaviness and darkness of lead. Lead is like compacted waste, dull
and blunt and poisonous. Even pure lead grows a crust of lead
carbonate, sullying itself with a whitish mould. Both gold and
lead are heavy, both shine—one with light, and the other with
darkness—and both can be nicked with a few taps of a hammer.
Since lead is heavy (eleven times heavier than water, so that a
bucket of it can weigh hundreds of pounds) some alchemists
thought it was a degraded form of gold, a “sick” or “leprous”
gold. Others supposed it was young gold, immature and
“green.” 7 The mission of alchemy was to administer to the lead
and cure it into gold, or to nourish it until it grew into mature
gold. (There were also opposing voices: Gābir is supposed to
have said only “idiots” think lead and gold are linked. 8 ) An artist
who thinks of starting from lead is experiencing raw paint as a
kind of sickness, and painting as its convalescence: a common
enough feeling. A whole chain of associations bind artists to lead:
lead (along with tin) was said to be Saturn’s metal, and Saturn
was the sign of melancholy, and melancholy was the traditional
artists’ affliction. Those ideas have faded from consciousness
(except in popular books like Born Under Saturn 9 ), but the
sadness, darkness, and heaviness of lead are still very much
entangled with depression. For some artists the studio is a blight
until the work is well underway. The sight of the paints is
disheartening, and it brings on a leaden sadness. That is the
monstrous heaviness of the materia prima.
Aside from muck and lead, the materia prima went under a
bewil dering number of aliases. In pictures, it is often an egg—a
natural symbol for a starting point. Another common symbol is a
toad, for three surprisingly different reasons: first because they