Tripping on Paint
A painting is not a picture of an experience, but is the experience.
― Mark Rothko
Paint is a verb, a process, a discipline, even a creative or spiritual praxis related to praying, dancing, singing, and knowledge production.
Paint is slippery, gooey, oily, protean mud that can flow like water, honey, sap, or clay, but ultimately hardens (like amber) into a kind of stained glass. It’s heavy like stone, but it’s also light and transcendent, pure information, liquid thought, so radiant, so replete with expressive force, it has an almost psychic quality. Paint expresses ideas, gets into our heads and possesses or “occupies” the mind, as James Elkins puts it. Just the paint itself is so silky, so seductive, so utterly addictive, it can hold an artist’s attention for an entire lifetime.
What is this stuff? At the 2016 seminar Painting Beyond Itself: The Medium in the Post-medium Condition, Matt Saunders argued that the gooey, sticky, filmy core of the paint medium connects it to film and photography, and he reminds us that gooey paint is part of a production line that eventually delivers printed text, “the supply train behind words on a page.” Paint gives body to words. Saunders: “If we dig into any endeavor — into any medium — there’s often a gooey world lurking.” He also likens videos of printing ink production to porn.
In the same publication, Amy Sillman likens paint to drugs. In her essay On Color, Sillman compares paint to cocaine and to other expensive, precious substances like perfumes. Carol Armstrong leans more into the watery, fluid quality of paint, and defines the medium through the lens of Helen Frankenthaler’s AbEx painting, Flood (1967): “as coloristic vividity and pure fluidity, what Luce Irigaray would call the (feminine) “mechanics of fluids,” a liquid pour that flows between chance and intention, where one color in its fluid state runs into and influences the contiguous flow of another.” Elkins: “Painting is Alchemy. Its materials are worked without knowledge of their properties, by blind experiment, by the feel of the paint.”
In Painting Beyond Itself, Sabeth Buchmann remarks on the relationship between painting, dance, and film, exposing how paint is more than goo and surface: it’s a “medium,” which she defines as a “process of moving and being moved.” This is to say, the painting medium moves us, not the other way around.
