OIL PAINT, THE MEDIUM

The problem with oil paint, the medium, is that it is opaque.

“The special qualities of oil painting lent themselves to a special system of conventions for representing the visible.  The sum total of these conventions is the way of seeing invented by oil painting.”  p.  109

When you have great creative minds representing the visible world using oil paint, the medium, and then these oil paintings are hung in prestigious museums, and then we worship these oil paintings by working to emulate them, a special system of seeing is created.  Oil painting controls how we see.  It therefore controls how we think.

Depiction of the visible world with the medium, oil paint, has artificially elevated representation.  It has fostered a cultural mandate that to do anything of cultural significance, you had better start with representation.  And if it is not representational, then it has to be opaque.  From Vermeer to Klee, oil paint has kept and continues to keep everything opaque.

“It is usually said that an oil painting in its frame is like an imaginary window open onto the world…it’s model is not so much a framed window opening onto the world as a safe let into the wall, a safe in which the visible has been deposited.”  p. 109

Yes, when you engage in representation, it is as if you are putting your ideas into a small box.  Or, representation is akin to those dioramas you see in natural history museums;  despite everyone’s best efforts to make it look real, it looks fake.   Or representation is like playing with a doll’s house;  while every piece of furniture is made to look real, the net effect is playing with toys.

The image at the left is Vermeer’s The Music Lesson.  The box/diorama/doll house is the three dimensional space represented by the single point projection.  As Berger says, the visual idea, whatever it is, is locked safely away.

This is not the first time that we have addressed the problem with oil paint opacity in relation to western culture.  See for example, The Medium is the Massage, or Painting Dimensionalization.

1.  Berger, John. Ways of Seeing. Penguin Books, London. 1977.