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

WHAT PAINTING IS 77
live in murky undergrowth, second because they were thought to
be poisonous (common medical opinion had it that great poisons
could draw out poisons from other materials, so that a poisonous
toad could suck the leprosy from lead and remake it into gold),
and third because there were legends that toads lived deep
underground, even inside rocks, and that they sometimes grew
lumps of gold inside their heads. Often, too, dragons stand for
the materia prima, because they are associated with chasms,
mountains, and caves.
Other alchemists chose to be more specific about the materia
prima. Robert Fludd took water as his materia prima, though he
did not mean the Greek element water, but the primary waters
that light brought forth out of chaos in the book of Genesis. 10 In
the same vein the alchemist who called himself Cleidophorus
Mystagogus thought the universal spirit must be a mist, a vapor,
a chaos, “or rather an unctuous and viscous water, which is the
true matter of all the ancient philosophers.” 11 Fludd and
“Cleidophorus” both believed materia prima must be like the
nebulous silent waters that felt the shadow of God’s spirit
floating overhead—“and the spirit of God moved upon the face of
the waters,” as it says in Genesis 1:2: “The earth was without
form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep.”
Alchemists loved those words, “without form and void,” and
many of them knew just enough Hebrew to quote the opening
verses of Genesis, including the words tohu wa
bohu, One sign for materia prima captures this perfectly: a few
tenta-tive bubbles or droplets, almost forming a cross. 12
When painters think this way, they are experiencing the
materia prima as a moment of silence before the work begins: the
colors on the palette are empty, “without form and void.” Before
creation the waters are still, colorless, odorless, lightless,
motionless: they are pure potential, waiting for the movements
and light that will disperse them across the canvas. From this
perspective, the materia prima is the gloom that envelops the
starting moment of any enterprise. It is a feeling that artists know
very well. When the work is about to commence, there has to be
some tenuous notion of what will happen, but it is usually
wrapped and hidden even from the person who will be doing the
creating. An artist has a delicate sense of the work to come, and
how it might become the perfect thing in the imagination, but
historians and critics are wrong when they assume that it can be