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

WHAT PAINTING IS 83
mysterious ladder of the vision of Jacob,” “the seeds of bodies,”
the “seminal life of all things,” and finally, sperm.
On the other hand, if the materia prima has so many names, and
is so many things, then it cannot be any one of them. Other
alchemists make lists of things that the materia prima isn't, in
order to show us that it has to be all of them a once. Otto
Tachenius, a seventeenth century adept, says that "it is not with
the soft gums, nor with the hard excrements, it is not with green
raisins nor with herbal quintessences, strong waters, corrosive
salts, nor with Roman vitriol, not with acid talcum, nor impure
antimony, not with sulfur or mercury, not even with the vulgar
metals themselves that an able artist will work at our Great
Work.” 24
No one can name the materia prima because it has to be both
nothing (nothing yet, nothing that has been formed) and
everything (everything in potentia, all the things that wait to
exist). Like the formative chaos of Creation, masses of undivided
paint can become anything in the world. A spot of reddish
pigment might end up as the little red at the corner of a painted
eye, and a touch of dirty white might become the gleam on a
pearl. Materia prima is a name for the state of mind that sees
everything in nothing. By logical inversion, the choices are more
vast when the raw materials are more restricted. If the starting
point is a neat palette laid out with the canonical Roy G. Biv
spectrum, then many kinds of paintings will be out of bounds. If
the starting point is a formless repulsive slug—or a drop of semen
— then anything is possible.
In the end there are two basic choices for the materia prima, and
either might be the best path into the work. On the one hand, it
might be a boiling mixture of all the elements of the world,
tangled and corrupted and half-formed, melted and burnt and
uselessly fused. The task then would be to complete the work by
purifying and extracting the pure Stone from its matrix. On the
other hand, the starting place might be empty, like the calm
sublime waters of the second verse of Genesis, slowly swirling
with everything uncreated, in potentia as theologians say—or the
blank canvas before the work has begun. In that case what
matters is the pureness of the void, and the challenge is to
reproduce creation from nothing, ex nihilo. That is Fludd’s watery
first principle: a silent pregnancy, infused with substances
waiting to be born. 25 It is also the solid lightless mass of lead, and