By James Elkins
Unlike many books on portray that sometimes discuss artwork or painters, James Elkins’ compelling and unique paintings makes a speciality of alchemy, for just like the alchemist, the painter seeks to rework and be reworked by way of the medium.
In What portray Is, James Elkins communicates the adventure of portray past the conventional vocabulary of artwork background. Alchemy offers a mystical language to discover what it's a painter relatively does in her or his studio - the smells, the mess, the fight to manage the uncontrollable, the specific wisdom basically painters carry of the way shades will combine, and the way they'll glance.
Written from the viewpoint of a painter-turned-art historian, What portray Is is like not anything you've ever examine art.
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Additional info for What painting is : how to think about oil painting, using the language of alchemy
Sample text
But artists and alchemists have to keep their eye on everything, because they do not know what to expect. Monet paid strict attention to the motions of his wrist and arm, and the varying pressure of his brush against the canvas. He must have spent hours at a time getting his media just right, testing it again and again by dipping a brush into it, or tilting the palette to see how fast it ran. All of it was done without words, but with intense concentration. There might be a world of difference between a greasy oil and an oily grease, or a reddish white and a whitish red.
Without quantifiers, Marius’s distinctions are just rules of thumb, incomplete descriptions that have to be corrected by experience. That is the problem that confronts artists, because they are interested in nuances of mixture. It is not possible to make a recipe for the textures Monet used, or the colors he mixed; instead, the student has to see them made, and then repeat the process as accurately as possible. Without the instruments of quantitative science the world will remain a blur. Here, as a last example, is a concerted attempt to order the world: a list summarizing an anonymous medieval treatise traditionally ascribed to the Arabic alchemist Gābir Ibn Hajjān.
Thirteen stones 1. Marchasita [pyrites, including “fool’s gold,” FeS2] a. Similar to silver in color b. Red, like copper c. Black, like iron d. Golden 2. Magnesia [a miscellaneous category] A SHORT COURSE IN FORGETTING CHEMISTRY 29 a. Like black earth, presenting “shining eyes” when broken [probably manganese oxide with small reflective crystals] b. Ferrous, bitter, and masculine c. , rhodochrosite or rhodonite] 3. Edaus [either iron ore composed of iron oxide, or iron filings or iron slag] 4. Thutia [zinc compounds, especially zinc carbonate, ZnCO3, and zinc oxide, the latter a sublimation product in brass-making] 5.