What Painting Is: How to Think about Oil Painting ... - Victoria Vesna
What Painting Is: How to Think about Oil Painting ... - Victoria Vesna What Painting Is: How to Think about Oil Painting ... - Victoria Vesna
WHAT PAINTING IS 87 half-light and emerge with their colors changed. A piece of clean grey cadmium (Cd), dipped into the liquid, will eventually turn yellowish or golden, and tin (Sn) will blanch, taking on the look of white gold (called asem). 30 People who work in bronze casting know the stomach-turning fumes of liver of sulfur, which tints bronze in the same way. Even the most unpromising jar of industrial waste can yield beautiful results. In painting, this materia prima is the full chromatic spectrum of the palette in all its force and incoherence. Kandinsky described it most eloquently when he remembered the first box of paints he got as a child. The paints flowed from the tubes, he said, jubilant, sumptuous, reflective, dreamy, absorbed in themselves, with deep seriousness or a mischievous sparkle…those strange beings we call colors came out one after another, living in and for themselves, autonomous, endowed with all the qualities needed for their future autonomous life… At times it seemed to me that whenever the paintbrush…tore away part of that living being which is a color, it gave birth to a musical sound. For Kandinsky colors were the chaos itself, the original source of energy and life. He loved the strife of colors, the sense of balance we have lost, tottering principles, unexpected assaults, great questions, apparently useless striving, storm and tempest, broken chains, antitheses and contradictions, these make up our harmony…Legitimate and illegitimate combinations of colors, the shock of contrasting colors, the silencing of one color by another, the checking of fluid color spots by contours of design, the overflowing of these contours, the mingling and the sharp separation of surfaces, all these open great vistas of purely pictorial possibility. 31 This is the churning, engrossing flux that Zosimos envisioned, full of sharp detail and mutating possibilities. In art, colors and pigments can also be a deep, poisonous addiction. Kandinsky probably felt them too intensely, and it led him into a wandering mysticism. No one sees Kandinsky’s paintings the way he insisted they should be seen: no one reads the occult personality
88 THE MOULDY MATERIA PRIMA of each color—the yellow that is “brash and importunate,” that “stabs and upsets people,” and has a “painful shrillness,” or the delicate balance of orange, “like a man convinced of his own powers”—because if they did, there would simply be too much to attend to in any painting. Instead, we back away from his fanatical private symbolism and enjoy the paintings in other ways. The turmoil of colors is hypnotic, but it is a dangerous fascination. Most artists keep the “inner life” of colors at arm’s length, in order to be able to control colors, to use them and navigate among them rather than bobbing helplessly in Zosimos’s pot. Kandinsky spun elaborate stories, both for himself and his public, to explain what his pictures were doing with color and shape. But he always claimed to be producing order: to be making colors express certain ideas, or arranging shapes so they could communicate forces and motions. Other artists have not tried to improve on the materia prima, but to display it in all its wildness. There are several reasons why Jackson Pollock started putting his canvases on the floor instead of tacking them to a wall. 32 It was an act of rebellion against academic painting and easel painting of all kinds, and it helped squelch the ingrained desire to see the picture as a window, as if it only existed to produce an illusion of depth. It also gave him a different vantage on the canvas: instead of standing in front of it, or sitting on a studio chair, he had to bend over, sometimes so far that he had to put his hand down to steady himself. (In some paintings there are painted hand prints as evidence.) On occasion he stumbled, and left a smear where his foot slipped. Things fell onto the paint and stayed there until he noticed them: the paintings preserve negative impressions of brushes, cigarettes, and paper; and they are littered with tiny scraps, ash, dust, and hair. 33 (The white wisp at the lower right of COLOR PLATE 5, hanging into the darkness, is a piece of cotton swab left by a conservator. Tufts of cotton are very common in paintings, and it is a sign of how few people bother to look closely that they remain in place year after year. They can be found in virtually any painting that has been cleaned in the last fifty years, and some canvases have dozens of them.) For people who see Pollock’s works for the first time, they can seem to be complete chaos, with no differentiation or order. But the same horizontal position that helped Pollock cover them also determined the kinds of gestures
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WHAT PAINTING IS 87<br />
half-light and emerge with their colors changed. A piece of clean<br />
grey cadmium (Cd), dipped in<strong>to</strong> the liquid, will eventually turn<br />
yellowish or golden, and tin (Sn) will blanch, taking on the look<br />
of white gold (called asem). 30 People who work in bronze casting<br />
know the s<strong>to</strong>mach-turning fumes of liver of sulfur, which tints<br />
bronze in the same way. Even the most unpromising jar of<br />
industrial waste can yield beautiful results.<br />
In painting, this materia prima is the full chromatic spectrum of<br />
the palette in all its force and incoherence. Kandinsky described<br />
it most eloquently when he remembered the first box of paints he<br />
got as a child. The paints flowed from the tubes, he said,<br />
jubilant, sumptuous, reflective, dreamy, absorbed in<br />
themselves, with deep seriousness or a mischievous<br />
sparkle…those strange beings we call colors came out one<br />
after another, living in and for themselves, au<strong>to</strong>nomous,<br />
endowed with all the qualities needed for their future<br />
au<strong>to</strong>nomous life… At times it seemed <strong>to</strong> me that whenever<br />
the paintbrush…<strong>to</strong>re away part of that living being which is<br />
a color, it gave birth <strong>to</strong> a musical sound.<br />
For Kandinsky colors were the chaos itself, the original source of<br />
energy and life. He loved<br />
the strife of colors, the sense of balance we have lost,<br />
<strong>to</strong>ttering principles, unexpected assaults, great questions,<br />
apparently useless striving, s<strong>to</strong>rm and tempest, broken<br />
chains, antitheses and contradictions, these make up our<br />
harmony…Legitimate and illegitimate combinations of<br />
colors, the shock of contrasting colors, the silencing of one<br />
color by another, the checking of fluid color spots by<br />
con<strong>to</strong>urs of design, the overflowing of these con<strong>to</strong>urs, the<br />
mingling and the sharp separation of surfaces, all these<br />
open great vistas of purely pic<strong>to</strong>rial possibility. 31<br />
This is the churning, engrossing flux that Zosimos envisioned,<br />
full of sharp detail and mutating possibilities. In art, colors and<br />
pigments can also be a deep, poisonous addiction. Kandinsky<br />
probably felt them <strong>to</strong>o intensely, and it led him in<strong>to</strong> a wandering<br />
mysticism. No one sees Kandinsky’s paintings the way he<br />
insisted they should be seen: no one reads the occult personality
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