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

78 THE MOULDY MATERIA PRIMA
clearly seen in advance. No painter knows what the picture will
look like, and those painters who try too hard to use paint to
realize an idea are typically disappointed. Like poetry or any
other creative enterprise, painting is something that is worked out
in the making, and the work and its maker exchange ideas and
change one another. The ideal image of the work is blurred and
hard to picture, as if it weren’t quite there, or as if it were
something seen out of the corner of the eye. If the artist tries to
turn and look at it directly, it vanishes. The only way to capture
it is to do the work, and remake the idea through the paint. The
state of mind at the beginning of the creation of a work of art is
nearly inaccessible. What an artist knows is principally what will
happen in the next second, not the next hour or month. Thoughts
at the moment of beginning are only guideposts, and the actual
substance of the work is entirely inchoate. This is the common
ground of artistic process, which begins in an odd inarticulate
place that is neither well known nor unknown, neither substantial
nor entirely invisible.
The materia prima was also imagined as a way-station between
utter chaos and perfection. It held every substance, but in an
occluded form. One of the most compressed alchemical symbols
is John Dee’s “hieroglyphic monad,” which he advertises as a
monogram that includes all seven metals:
Some of them are very distorted, but at least mercury and
copper are easy to see. 13 The of tin, for instance, is hiding on
its side at the bottom of the monad. In Dee’s theory, the monad
has the universe of substances within itself: it is both the
dishevelled materia prima and the glyph of perfection.
The most elaborate single alchemical sign appears in an
anonymous book called The Golden Chain of Homer, or a
Description of the Origin of Nature and Natural Things. 14 The chain
links heaven and earth, with heaven this time at the bottom.
Reading from the top, first comes chaos itself, and then three
versions of the “spirit of the world,” each one improving over the