What Painting Is

By James Elkins

Published by Routledge
New York, NY  2000

Review by Robert Wittig

It wasn't in the painting section at all, this smallish book titled What Painting Is. I found it in the Social Science section, or whatever they call the area that includes current books on race, poverty and other social trends. As usual, I was looking for something else. Whether it belonged there, or someone had just stuck it on the shelf to save the trouble of walking back to the Fine Arts section, I don't know. Because I am a painter, the title literally jumped out at me: What Painting Is. My first response was, as usual, skeptical. I have read quite a few books and numerous articles on painting and art, that attempted in one way or another to explain 'what painting was' or 'what art was,' and have been disappointed with the explanations, more often than not.

These sort of books most often fall into three broad categories, which I refer to as:

1) 'How-to' books, written by painters or artists, that describe the technique of the writer. While instructive in their own way, these books do not explain painting, but only a single person's execution technique.

2) 'Tortured Artist' books, which attempt to explain the artist's creative process and 'suffering' as imagined by someone with a vivid imagination and no real knowledge as to what sort of garbage actually floats around in a painter's head while painting. Speaking only for myself, whatever sort of struggling and suffering I go through in order to paint, I must be blissfully unaware of, at least while I am painting. In fact, the actual thoughts in my head during the process, when not focused on some minute issue like 'Sheesh ... the nose really does look like a banana,' or 'No ... too much blue ... no ... too much red ... ' are more apt to be focused on other important stuff like 'I wonder if there is any cheese left, to go with the chips.'

3) 'Proclamations' made by Art Authorities as to the 'real' meaning of art, written in a manner (Artspeak) that violates Karl Popper's admonition:

"Every intellectual has a very special responsibility. He has the privilege and the opportunity of studying. In return, he owes it to his fellow men (or society) to represent the results of his study as simply, clearly, and modestly as he can. The worst thing that intellectuals can do—the cardinal sin—is to try to set themselves up as great prophets vis-à-vis their fellow men and to impress them with puzzling philosophies. Anyone who cannot speak simply and clearly should say nothing and continue to work until he can do so."

In What Painting Is Mr. Elkins has produced a book that manages to avoid falling into any of these three categories, and pays respect to Popper's admonition in that it is clearly and understandably written, a feat that is especially noteworthy due to the fact that in the book, Mr. Elkins discusses alchemy at length, about as arcane and obscure a subject as the 21st century mindset can imagine.

As soon as I picked up the book, I noticed the cover art: a detail from one of Rembrandt's self-portraits, a clever choice, in that it suspended my skepticism long enough for me to open the book and read through the table of contents, and examine the introduction and the colour plates, at which point I decided I was willing to pay the $16US to find out what this fellow had to say about painting. I was not disappointed.

I'm not going to give up the plot. For that, you will have to purchase the book. What I will say is that the reason Mr. Elkins was able to describe in words an experience that I am completely familiar with is due in large part to his being both a painter, and an art scholar. He therefore has at his disposal a working knowledge of 'both sides of the fence,' giving the artistic perspective of an art historian to the essentially wordless and solitary experience of painting. Although at times I found the alchemic portions of the book a bit too dry and tedious for my taste, I was rewarded for my patience time and again, by surprising insights into my own state of mind while painting, a state of mind that is essentially private and exists 'without saying.'

I would recommend this book for anyone, painter or non-painter, who has an interest in the solitary creative process. It is a book that could not have been written by someone who hadn't 'been there' himself, and couldn't have been written, either, by someone who was exclusively a painter and lacked the academic perspective to bring several diverse subjects together into a coherent and well integrated whole. This is interdisciplinary writing at its best.

In closing, I will let Mr. Elkins have the last words:

"As the decades go by, a painter's life becomes a life lived with oil paint, a story told in the thickness of oil. Any history of painting that does not take that obsession seriously is incomplete."

[Ed. For a list of James Elkins' works, with purchase links to his pages at Amazon.com, go to: www.jameselkins.com]

Copyright © Robert Wittig 2003