Fig. 5. Experiments in Suminagashi, photograph, Megan Walch, 2012.
I began by observing the interaction of ink, oil and water using a variant of the Japanese technique called Suminagashi, ‘floating ink’. This method of creating patterns on water with ink predates European marbling. I placed small drops of black ink and clear cooking oil into a static bowl of water with the tip of a wooden skewer. I observed repulsion between the oil and ink and the amalgamation of ink and water. I alternated drops of ink with oil to drive the ink into a series of concentric rings. I introduced turbulence by fanning air across the surface. This experiment led from the question: is it more effective to depict an idea or to embody it? Is it more effective to employ fluidity in the construction of paintings or to depict it?
I proceeded to mix acrylic paint on a palette and observe the material for clues. I selected photographs from which to paint small studies, using wet-into- wet oil painting technique. After doing these, I discovered that they were self- referential and that there was no representational problem that I was systematically testing. I was representing plasticity rather than employing it. I was holding fluidity and plasticity at arm’s length.
Figs. 7-10. Megan Walch, Studies: Mixing Viscous Acrylic Paint, 2012-13. Oil on board, 20 x 30 cm. Collection of the artist.
I tested the fluidity of paint, and its capacity to generate form in the paintings, with the aim of expressing a broader vocabulary of paint.
In an essay accompanying the 2016 exhibition Painting. More Painting,
the Director of International Art at the Art Gallery of New South Wales and co- curator Justin Paton writes: “You are building your image in real time from matter that slips and slides, and only by agreeing to be like the medium, to yield and respond, will the painting continue to grow.”31 Thinking in the medium of paint provided the foundation of this research project. Paint as a medium became a
31 Justin Paton, "Necessity and Glut: Notes on Painting.," in Painting. More Painting, ed.
theme and was used as a method to construct paintings. This exegesis discusses the dynamic material performance of paint as an active modality of material thinking that works between skill and abandonment. “It is an auto-ethnographic account of the material performativity of paint and of the interplay between base materiality, chemical interactions and my improvised embodied action.”32 The interplay between the artist and the medium was active and contingent. The risk of failure and uncertainty was embedded in the working process: from the pouring of paint and the interplay between painted layers, to the interaction of fluid colour and the awkward compositions that resulted. This was raising the stakes for my painting; I was taking greater risks and attempting to avoid tasteful aesthetic choices.
The constant risk of failure lay at the heart of alchemical practice because the quest for the Philosopher's Stone was doomed from the outset.33 Materia prima – first matter – was the inchoate substance required for alchemy. I considered the medium of paint to be materia prima, and metamorphosis occurred through the plasticity of the medium. In alchemy, solids must be liquefied before being congealed. I began the paintings by liquefying enamel paint by mixing it with solvent.
The Philosopher's Stone was said to be a common substance, found everywhere but unrecognised and unappreciated. The Stone was sought by alchemists for its supposed ability to transform base metals into precious ones.
32 {Walch, 2015 #193}
33 Brian Cotnoir, The Weiser Concise Guide to Alchemy,ed. James Wasserman (Newburyport:
The Philosopher’s Stone was thought to prolong life, and to bring about spiritual revitalisation and the perfection of the human soul – “substance transformation was self transformation”.34 “The central concept in alchemy was transmutation: the fundamental change of one thing into another, from a grosser, impure state to a more refined, balanced, and pure state. This was to be understood on multiple levels – physically, spiritually, and symbolically.”35 The quest for the Stone
encouraged alchemists (including Isaac Newton) to examine substances and their interactions in their laboratories; for the true alchemist, the process was more important than the goal.36 This ancient tradition eventually became a discredited proto-science, but it had led to early developments in science, medicine and chemistry. It contributed knowledge related to ore testing and refining, metalworking, gunpowder production, ink, dyes, paints, cosmetics, leather tanning, ceramics, glassmaking, the preparation of extracts, and to distillation, as well as the periodic table.37 In the practice of alchemy, there were four basic techniques: ‘purification’, ‘solution’, ‘coagulation’ and ‘combination’.38
In his early book, What Painting Is: How to Think About Oil Painting, Using the Language of Alchemy, James Elkins stated that “paint is liquid thought”, he argued that “thinking inpainting is thinking as paint"; he noted that
34 Seegers Ulli, "Metabolic Processes," in Art and Alchemy the Mystery of Transformation
(Dusseldort: Museum Kunstpalast 2014).
35 Ibid.
36 Cotnoir, Guide to Alchemy. 37 Ibid.
very little has been written about this kind of investigation.39 Towards the end of my project I emailed Elkins to ask whether he still believed studio-based PhDs in the visual arts to be antithetical to research. He replied with a link to a chapter, “Looking at an Oil Painting”, from an unpublished book, Our Visual Worlds, which addresses ways to discuss painting in a research culture. One of these ways is to focus on a discussion of materiality, beginning with Georges Bataille’s base materialism. Elkins’ current opinion is that discussions of materiality in painting are legitimate when they do not privilege materiality at the expensive of meaning.40