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

84 THE MOULDY MATERIA PRIMA
the occluded lump of swamp mud. In painting it is emptiness,
and also darkness. (The blank white canvas is a modern
convention; in the past, the starting point was the dark
imprimatura.) In the beginning is the dull pile of earth tones, the
dark greys or blacks at the bottom of the value scale. This materia
prima is silent, cold, and strange. Tachenius says that in the
beginning, God created a chaos, which emerged “as a confused
mass from the depth of Nothing.” This massa confusa did not look
holy. “One would have said,” he continues, “that disorder made
it, and that it could not be the work of God.” 26 Yet even this
uncanny substance can be molded. Slowly and carefully, God
built out of the darkness, making light, and then water, and then
land, and plants and animals…. Most painters before the
twentieth century began from formlessness. They progressed by
orderly and systematic steps in the creation of their pictures, like
architects building from the cleared ground to the cornice. In
modern art, the silence of the blank canvas is broken more
violently, but it is still the place to begin.
In the other option the materia prima is a roiling sea of
impurities. This is not the still waters of Genesis, but the noisy
churning of the Flood. It is a dangerous condition, with
substances and ideas tossing violently about, and thoughts and
experiments out of control. Nothing is fixed: everything is
volatile, explosive, half-formed. Ideas flash by like the obscure
names on Ruland’s lists. In painting, the canvas is a flurry,
suggesting shapes but not spelling anything out. Especially in the
past century, many painters have preferred to begin this way;
and even before modernism, painters invented shapes by looking
at stained walls or throwing painted rags and sponges at the
canvas. Stories like that are told of Leonardo da Vinci, Botticelli,
and others. Rubens instructed his assistants to put on the
imprimatura with large brushes so the stray marks would inspire
him, and the wild brown streaks can still be seen in many of his
paintings. This first kind of materia prima is rich in possibilities,
but also hard to control. Thinking of the danger, some alchemists
pictured them selves as Noah, floating on the ocean of turbulent
metals and trying to preserve some token order on board the
alchemical ark (Figure 2).
One reason Ruland’s lists are faintly sinister is that the materia
prima shares an important trait with the devil: they both have a
thousand names. The turbulent materia prima is also a kind of