What Painting Is

How to Think about Oil Painting Using the Language of Alchemy

James Elkins

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429843501
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: History of Art

In this classic text, James Elkins communicates the experience of painting beyond the traditional vocabulary of art history. Alchemy provides a strange language to explore what it is a painter really does in the studio—the smells, the mess, the struggle to control the uncontrollable, the special knowledge only painters hold of how colors will mix, and how they will look. Written from the perspective of a painter-turned-art historian, this anniversary edition includes a new introduction and preface by Elkins in which he further reflects on the experience of painting and its role in the study of art today.

1

A short course in forgetting chemistry

PAINTING IS alchemy. Its materials are worked without knowledge of their properties, by blind experiment, by the feel of the paint. A painter knows what to do by the tug of the brush as it pulls through a mixture of oils, and by the look of colored slurries on the palette. Drawing is a matter of touch: the pressure of the charcoal on the slightly yielding paper, the sticky slip of the oil crayon between the fingers. Artists become expert in distinguishing between degrees of gloss and wetness—and they do so without knowing how they do it, or how chemicals create their effects.

Monet’s paintings are a case in point. They seem especially simple to many people, as if Monet were the master of certain moods—of moist bluish twilight or candent yellow beaches—but nothing more: as if he had no sense that painting could be anything but a method for fixing light onto canvas. In his singleminded pursuit of the grain and feel of light, he seems to forget who he is, and who he is painting. He has only a weak attachment to people, and he treats the figures who stray into his pictures as if they were colored dolls instead of friends and relatives.¹ Instead, his attention is riveted to the blurry shapes that come forward through the imperfect atmosphere, and on the shifting tints of light that somehow congeal into meadows and oceans and haystacks. In that respect Monet’s paintings are masterpieces of repression, keeping every thought quiet in order to concentrate on light: in order to pretend that there is nothing in the world—to borrow a phrase of Philip Larkin’s—but the wordless play of “any-angled light,” congregating endlessly on shadowed cliffs and ocean waves.²

Recently, art historians have learned to see that more is happening, and that Monet tried to give his paintings the sense of freedom and civility that he thought was appropriate to bourgeois society. He painted contemporary scenes, recent technology such as steamboats, and the life of leisure that he valued most. But still the idea persists that Monet is “just an eye,” as Cezanne said, and for good reason: his paintings are ravishing, even for people who don’t particularly like glaring multicolored sunlight or soggy green gardens. These days, art historians are apt to be a little indifferent to Monet’s eye, and the Impressionists can easily seem less interesting than the generations before them, who were tortured by history and the pressure of great painting, or the generations that followed, with their pseudoscientific and mystical preoccupations. A large part of that lack of engagement on the part of historians comes from Monet’s technique itself: the paintings seem so obviously daubed, as if his only thought for the canvas was to cover it with paint as efficiently as possible. It can look as if he allowed one stroke for a leaf, another for a flower, and so on, building up meadows and forests through a tedious repetition. Often there is not much variety in the marks—no difference between thin and thick passages, no places where the canvas is suddenly bare, no contrasts between flat areas and corrugated impasto. Everything has a monotonous texture, like a commercial shag rug. In the later paintings, his technique only seems to get rougher and less controlled, until finally he ends up making lily pads and flowers out of swarms of haphazard brushstrokes, flailed over the canvas as if he didn’t care. The paintings look easy, and even more childlike than the Abstract Expressionist paintings that used to be maligned for their supposedly childish technique.

But as I learned by trying to copy Monet’s paintings, that idea is completely mistaken (COLOR PLATE 2). It is not possible to reproduce the effect of a Monet painting by jousting mechanically with the canvas, jabbing a dot of paint here and planting another one there, until the surface is uniformly puckered in Monet’s signature texture. A painter who does that will end up with a picture that looks soft and uninteresting, with a dull pattern of swirling circles like the ones left by some electric rug cleaners. A brush that’s loaded with paint and then pushed onto the canvas makes a circle, more or less, but Monet’s pictures do not have any circles in them. There is only one slightly rounded mark in this detail from one of his garden paintings—the blue patch at the lower right—and it’s rectangular, not circular at all.

Nor does it help to make the usual sideways swipes at the canvas, because then the picture turns into a rainstorm of oval droplets, all falling in one direction. Some second-rate painters of Monet’s generation tried to paint that way, and the result is pictures that have a windswept effect, as if they were greasy surfaces smeared by a cleaning cloth. (Sassetta’s Madonna has the windswept effect in miniature, since he painted by slight flexes of his thumb and index finger, each time bringing the brush a few millimeters down and to the left.) But Monet’s pictures have no direction: they are perfectly balanced, and marks go in all directions equally. Would it be possible to tell which way is up in this detail? It is omnidirectional, with no sign of the diagonal fall of brushmarks that is the sure sign of an ordinary painter. To a nonpainter, it may sound like an easy matter to make marks in all directions: after all, an artist could try painting with both hands, or experiment with rotating the canvas. But getting real directionlessness is immensely difficult: repeated gestures naturally fall into line with one another, and artists have to work hard against their own anatomy to make sure that one kind of mark does not overwhelm the others.

Not all painters want the effect Monet achieved: many prefer the energy that directed brushstrokes give, and they work with the marks as Sassetta did, leading them up and down figures, and around contours. Painters who prefer to hide the signs of their brushwork normally do so by smearing their brushstrokes into uniform areas, or else miniaturizing their brushstrokes so they fall below the threshold of normal vision. (Sassetta almost does that: in the original, the Madonna’s head is quite small.) But for Monet and other Impressionists those strategies wouldn’t have seemed right. They wanted something painterly, where the brushmarks show, and they wanted a more exacting lack of directional motion, something like the inhuman stasis that nature itself seems to have. A distant landscape might shimmer and sparkle in the sunlight, but it will not show any sign of running diagonally up or down. It merely exists: it’s not going anywhere, it doesn’t move from place to place. To achieve stasis in a painting, it turns out that it is not enough to make marks equally in all orientations as if they were scattered matchsticks. Such a painting will be a flurry of crisscrossing lines. To do what Monet did in this painting, it is necessary to make marks that have no set orientation and no uniform shape, so they can never congregate into herds and begin to march up and down like Seurat’s dots sometimes do. Each mark has to be different from each other mark: if one slants downward, the next has to go up. If one is straight, the next must be arcuate. Lancet strokes must follow rounded ones, zigzags must be cut across by ellipses, thickened strokes must be gouged by thin scrapes. Any pattern has to be defeated before it grows large enough to be seen by a casual eye.

And even this is too simple. An ordinary square inch in a Monet painting is a chaos, a scruffy mess of shapeless glints and tangles. His marks are so irregular, and so varied, and there are so many of them, that it is commonly impossible to tell how the surface was laid down. There is a zoo of marks in this detail that defy any simple description. At the top right is a bizarre boat-shaped trough, made by gouging wet paint with the brush handle, and then pulling back in perfect symmetry. A pool of Yellow Ochre has been dropped just to its left, and it ran slightly over the lip of the trough before it congealed. To the left of that, a streak of Vermilion or Indian Red comes down, leaving an irregular trail over a layer of Cerulean Blue and Lead White. The Japanese call this technique “flying white,” because a partly dry inkbrush will leave flashes of white as it drags across the silk. In the West, there is no such poetic name, and drybrush technique is normally just called scumbling (a word that can mean many other things as well). At the far upper left, some Ochre has just barely skimmed the surface of the canvas, depositing little yellow buds at each intersection of the weave. None of those marks have names: they are all irregular and none is like any other. And there are even more unclassifiable examples even in this little detail: a double, snaking mark of deep Ultramarine Blue enters the scene at the left center, scratches and skims its way to the right, skips a few centimeters, and then hooks left and doubles back. It’s a scumbled stroke, not a continuous brushstroke but a trail of shimmering vertical marks, like specters walking in a parade.

Twenty years ago, the art historian Robert Herbert noticed that it is often possible to see a pattern of brushstrokes that is actually underneath the painted scene, as if Monet painted on top of a rolling landscape of brushstrokes.³ If the paintings are lit from one side, those strokes can seem to make a painting by themselves: they are often thick, and they form a bas-relief of textures, like the fake oil paint texture that is pressed onto cheap reproductions of paintings. The “texture strokes,” as Herbert called them, do not follow the shapes and colors of the objects in the finished paintings. The burs and ridges of a single texture stroke might run across part of a meadow and into the sky, or across part of a house and into a tree. Often it is impossible to tell what color the texture strokes were, since they are completely covered by the thinner colors of the final scene. To Herbert, that was evidence that Monet was not as spontaneous as people thought, and that he had a “method”: a layered technique that required planning and patience in the manner of the Old Masters of the Renaissance. Apparently Monet had painted those brushstrokes, let them dry, and then made his paintings on top of them. But things are more chaotic than that. Monet did not lay down entire textured surfaces, and then leave the painting for two weeks while they dried, and then paint his pictures on top of them. (If he had, then the plastic reproductions would mimic his methods perfectly, since they are made by casting textured surfaces, coating them with photographic emulsion, and printing the paintings onto the surfaces.)

Instead, the texture strokes are themselves built up in layers, and the layering went on continuously and without premeditated method until the paintings reached the magical point where it became impossible to tell how they had been painted: then they were finished. That moment is well known to painters. If an artist begins to paint a field, say by coating the canvas with a layer of green and then going over it with lighter and darker green, it will be obvious that the lights and darks are resting on top of the original middle green. After a while the different shades might nearly cover the first green, but even if that green shows through in tiny crevices, it may still look as if the meadow was made by floating local colors on top of a uniform background. In Monet as in other very different painters, part of the object is to work until it is no longer possible to tell what paint is on top and what is underneath. When that happens, it is a magical moment because the painting suddenly stops looking like a flat color-by-number with a few added touches, and takes on a rich and confusing aspect. The meadow is no longer a green card scattered with cutout plants, but a rich loam matted with plant life and moving with living shadows. Monet’s texture strokes help that happen by raising glints of light that sparkle randomly among the painted stalks and leaves, confusing the eye and mimicking the hopeless chaos of an actual field. In this detail, the raw canvas shows through in a couple of places: one of them is just at the end of the snaking blue mark, short of the Emerald Green. But what color went down first? In the top half of the detail, it looks as if the light Cerulean Blue might be underneath, and the other colors on top of it—but on closer inspection, there is no uniform layer of Cerulean Blue. It’s a mixture, already layered with overlapping pigments. And in the lower half, it is hard to say if blue is on top of white, or vice versa: they seem to be tumbling together at the bottom.

The trick, then, which is much more than a simple trick, is to lay down strokes that are different from one another, and to keep overlapping and juxtaposing them until the entire surface begins to resonate with a bewildering complexity.⁴ The marks must not be simple dabs, or shaped dashes, or any other namable form, but they must mutate continuously, changing texture, outline, smoothness, color, viscosity, brilliance, and intensity in each moment. I have taught classes in the Art Institute of Chicago, in which students try to copy paintings; the first student of mine who set out to copy a Monet nearly gave up in frustration. Every time she put her brush to her canvas she ended up with some predictable pattern of marks. The first day, she tried to sketch in a scene of the ocean, which Monet had painted in a light greenish blue. She produced a white canvas, sprinkled with blue polka dots. We examined the original from a few inches away, and we saw the ocean was made of four colors: a deep purplish hue signifying the depths of the ocean, a light Cobalt Blue reflecting the sky, hints of Malachite Green, and Lead White foam for the breaking waves. So she tried again, and made an awful Op Art pattern of colored circles. We looked more closely at the original, and saw that some of the marks were laid down almost dry, and brushed hard against the canvas, and others were wetter, and set down more lightly. She tried again, not wiping anything away, but building up the paint, and it began to look a little better. But then she had to stop working on the ocean, because the wet paint was beginning to slur together into a single hue.

She went on like that for two months, letting portions dry while she worked on other pass...