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

90 THE MOULDY MATERIA PRIMA
fingers under the thumb and then springing them free. There are
other marks, as well: the film also shows a third family of
gestures, where the hand sweeps slowly back and forth—once
right, then left—and then he steps to the side, takes more paint,
and sweeps again. The movement is quick and efficient but
repetitive, like sowing grain, and it makes U shapes that overlap
into trails of W’s.
None of the three—the gentle arc, the violent splatter, and the
pendulum swing—are separate from one another. Often a harsh
movement will suddenly soften into a graceful fillip. In other
scenes, the violence is unabated and the paint begins to lose its
control. The canvases have evidence of all these gestures.
Looking at his paintings and thinking about the motions one by
one, the pictures become exhausting. The long continuous
strings, carefully placed as if they were drawn in charcoal, mean
he must have been leaning far over the canvas, carefully keeping
a constant speed and inclination to the brush or the can. In that
position, the back muscles begin to burn, and the legs get stiff.
The huge bursts of paint mean he was holding heavy paint cans
out over the canvas, and then reaching out to spill the paint at
just the right place: a gesture that reminds me of aching forearms
and shoulders. Worst are the small-scale swirls and dribbles, like
the ones in COLOR PLATE 5—they must have been made by
balancing close to the canvas, perhaps by propping himself on
one or two fingers, and leaning down close enough to drop just a
few fluid ounces of paint. It is in the microcosm that Pollock’s
allover technique becomes most random, because he begins to
lose control over the little bubbles and splatters. The tiny rivulets
spin down from his brushes like threads of molasses stretching
from the jar to the plate, making unpredictable scribbles on the
canvas. This detail is crossed by some larger-scale phenomena:
there is a wide trail of black leading up the left-hand third of the
passage; it is part of a network of violently propelled black streaks,
which comprise the main structure of the painting. The black
bands begin in oceanic spills, as at the right, and then thin into
long whips that cross half the width of the painting. Here a finer
filigree of black makes two loops across a stretch of nearly
unpainted canvas. These are the kinds of curves that were
“drawn,” that is placed in position rather than flung without
looking. This painting, Lavender Mist, has four scales of marks.
The first three account for the structure that can be seen from an