What Painting Is: How to Think About Oil Painting, Using the Language of Alchemy

Rating:
Summary: Interesting but arcane
Review: I found the premis interesting, especially the ideas expressed in the first chapter. However, some of the alchemical ideas in later chapters seemed totally irrelevant to the act of painting. Nevertheless, it is a book with ideas you won't find anywhere else.

Rating:
Summary: Should be retitled- WHAT ALCHEMY IS.
Review: Ok, I understand what Elkins is trying to do here. The Metaphor is fascinating: Painting is like antiquarian alchemy. The creative process of working, discovery, and distillation of unknown substances into tangible liquids, solids, etc. Blah, blah, blah. Another reviewer said, "Arcane." No kidding. This stuff can be interesting, but who cares what the alchemical symbol for mercury is? Except maybe a student of alchemy. Elkins practically admits since Modern Chemistry came along it's all nonsense and mythology. Does anybody besides Elkins really study this quackery? HERMAPHRODITES? OEDIPUS? Woody Allen would have a field day with this stuff. I want to learn about painting!! This book is replete with this kind of academia throughout the majority of the treatise, when it could have been outlined in the first Chapter. Elkins is very erudite and understands his topic well. He is extremely articulate. I had to read this with an unabridged dictionary in my lap. But his publisher should have made him focus more on his wonderful knowledge of painting. The book should have been titled, WHAT ALCHEMY IS.

However, what illuminates this murky essay is Elkins examination of paint on a surface. Included in this book are 15 color plates of telephotographic representations of some famous and not so famous paintings. It's here that Elkins shines a light on the process of putting color on a surface. Texture, Underpainting, Thickness, Brushstroke, Mixture, Sweat, Blood, Feces, Hair and more, are thoroughly deconstructed in these passages. AMAZING!! Who cares about the Metaphor? I'm a painter. I wanted more examination of painting. It's here, that Elkins gifts of teaching truely overwhelm the reader.

Maybe someday Elkins will write a REAL book called, "WHAT PAINTING IS." I think he'd have a runaway Bestseller on his hands.

Maybe if I bury some tubes of paint, a stretch, some eye of newt, and the red pubic hair of a menstrating woman in a stone house under a full moon and dig it up in 2 years, I'll have a representational masterpiece of an homunculus. HOLY COW!! I'M A GENIUS!!

GO BACK TO PAINTING, ELKINS!! YOU'RE UNDOUBTEDLY MAD!!

Rating:
Summary: Not just Alchemy
Review: This is an intriguing and new approach to understanding the intensity of the process of painting. Elkins offers unique insights and theory not on the subject matter that is presented as much on the metaphoric possibilities that link to painitng and its involvment. This book as his others open wonderful doors into further reasearch via thier bibliographies and references. Simply readable this book is worth the read. unforgettable. His newest book about the body should be another book to have.