The paint tube was invented in 1841, superseding pigs’ bladders and glass syringes as the primary tool of paint transport. Artists, or their assistants, previously ground each pigment by hand, carefully mixing the binding oil in the proper proportions. Paints could now be produced in bulk and sold in tin tubes with a cap. The cap could be screwed back on and the paints preserved for future use, providing flexibility and efficiency to painting outdoors. The manufactured paints had a balanced consistency that the artist could thin with oil, turpentine, or other mediums.
Paint in tubes also changed the way some artists approached painting. The artist Pierre-Auguste Renoir said, “Without tubes of paint, there would have been no Impressionism.” For the Impressionists, tubed paints offered an easily accessible variety of colors for their plein air palettes, motivating them to make spontaneous color choices. With greater quantities of preserved paint, they were able to apply paint more thickly. Etc.
After tubes, then came software. First in 1963, and then for everyone else in 1984. Nobody knew what it was going to allow that wasn’t previously possible… was it only increased speed? Painting 400 paintings in a month? Trying out a heap of different options and then being able to seamlessly undo them all, not knowing which one to choose? Choosing them all, as one, or allowing the idea of ‘one’ to become a dialogue of ‘states’. Or was it that while these tubeless software paintings had comparable form, they had extra forms, paint with plugins (pixels, presets, compression, chroma, transparency, layer). And as they were never wet in the first place, the paint never really dried…..
Paint without paint….
Had paint in some ways also become printer ink and screen technology, or ceased to be about a material and become an icon, representing an act of the hands? Or had it just become the ubiquitous phenomenon of arranging light, that was common to them all.
Nobody knew. Keep working. Just have to wait buster. Wait for nothing coz it’s in the microwave before it’s in the pan, bro.
Oil painting began in Afghanistan, and ended up being developed and pioneered in Holland. The whole process was seriously not unlike cooking food - using vegetable oil and boiling and all that stuff. It was an organic process of beastly items, bones and powders. Alchemy v2.0.4. If you take the example of food to the present, a combination of mass produced, consumed, and pre-packaged items are being used in every kitchen along with the more typical farm fresh items. Side by side. This is where painting was. Some elements were Fast Food, and some were still Ye Olde. A mixed bag where, depending on how old you were, you viewed it differently but generally as Utopian or Dystopian, but usually neither too strongly.
In the absence of any real conviction, the popular view was that we had entered neither Utopia or Dystopia… so obviously we sat somewhere in plain old Topia. The land of the past and the future, the good and the bad, the high and the low, the real and fake, the packaged and the natural, the best and the worst, the free and the priced, all side by side, even synthesized into the “ones”. etc. What a place to be huh…
U know, PAINTED,ETC. written all over it.
In these strange & beautiful bastardized badlands, the neat ordering of styles and periods was a real challenge to even the best cultural janitor. Like opening a toy at christmas, excitedly tearing off the paper but accidentally breaking it before it can be used. But then in the aftermath, glueing it all back together and doing something else that wasn’t exactly intended. Cultures, cultural inheritance. Fluid / Jagged as it was.
by Ry David Bradley
