What Painting is: How to Think about Oil Painting, Using the Language of AlchemyUnlike many books on painting that usually talk about art or painters, James Elkins' compelling and original work focuses on alchemy, for like the alchemist, the painter seeks to transform and be transformed by the medium. In What Painting Is, James Elkins communicates the experience of painting beyond the traditional vocabulary of art history. Alchemy provides a magical language to explore what it is a painter really does in her or his studio - the smells, the mess, the struggle to control the uncontrollable, the special knowledge only painters hold of how colours will mix, and how they will look. Written from the perspective of a painter-turned-art historian, What Painting Is is like nothing you have ever read about art. |
Contents
A short course in forgetting chemistry | 9 |
How to count in oil and stone | 40 |
The mouldy materia prima | 68 |
How do substances occupy the mind? | 96 |
Coagulating cohobating macerating reverberating | 117 |
The studio as a kind of psychosis | 147 |
Other editions - View all
What Painting is: How to Think about Oil Painting, Using the Language of Alchemy James Elkins No preview available - 2000 |
Common terms and phrases
alchemists Ambix Andreas Libavius antimony art history Artephius Arthur Edward Waite artists Atalanta Fugiens Basil Valentine become begin blue body boiled brush brushstrokes burning called canvas century chaos chemical COLOR PLATE copper crucible dark distillation dyad earth edited elements everything experience fire flask fluid four Frankfurt Gallery of Art gestures glazes gold green happens heat hermaphrodite historians idea imagine imprimatura Johann Jung kind laboratory layers lead light liquid London look Maier marks materia meaning mercury metals method Michael Maier mind mixed mixture modern chemistry monad Monet National Gallery nature never numerology Oedipus oil paint ouroboros painters palette Paracelsus Paris philosopher's picture pigments possible powder principles recipe Renaissance reprinted Robert Fludd salt Sassetta sense Sexual alchemy silver skin soul spirit studio substances sulfur symbols technique texts texture thin things thought tion Titian translated University Press vapor vessel volatile yellow