The Thumbnail Book Reviews

by John Q McDonald --- 9 December 1998

What Painting Is

How to Think about Oil Painting, Using the Language of Alchemy

by James Elkins

This is an extremely peculiar book. In its pages, teacher, art historian and sometime artist Elkins describes the very act of painting by tying its language to that of the ancient arts of alchemy. He is describing the very detailed act of applying oil paint to canvas, and the attendant obsessions within artists themselves; the involvement of the unconscious and conscious with the paint itself, the colors, textures, odors and movement. The ancient pseudoscience of alchemy, still practised in some corners today, is an appropriate angle from which to explore these aspects of painting. Alchemy shares many of the same obsessive qualities, as well as non-scientific views of substances. After all, few artist care about the chemical content of their paints, but all care about the textures and colors. Elkins dismisses the Jungian extrapolations of alchemy, preferring the pseudo-experimental aspects over the psychological ones. As a result, the book is rich in historical detail of the practice of alchemy. In fact, Elkins labors more, it seems, over alchemy than the painting he has set out to describe. A few of his analogies and interpretations are a stretch, but much of what he shows ties these two arts closely. The resulting point of the work, really, isn't particularly strong, but if you paint, there will be brilliant moments of recognition here. The book has fine color detailed images of paintings, showing the rich colors and textures, the feel, of paintings. This view of art is too often lost in all the interpretation and analysis of historians and critics. A quirky and intense book.

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