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

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