The Secrets of Painting
By Lachlan Goudie
Thames & Hudson/383 pages/$50
Reviewed by Ed Voves
Original photography by Anne Lloyd
The calendar here at Art Eyewitness is structured according to five seasons: spring, summer, autumn and winter like the rest of the world - and one, very exceptional, span of time. This unconventional fifth season begins during the last week of April and, most years, extends almost to the end of May.
Iris Season.
Anne and I love this regal, elegant perennial with its six petals, three upright "standards" and three spreading "falls." Nothing symbolizes the yearly rebirth of nature like the Iris.
The extraordinary story of Korin's Irises is also a tale of redemption. Ogata Korin (1658-1716), the playboy son of a wealthy merchant, had squandered his inheritance. With Irises, he set out to make a masterpiece which would restore his family's honor and his financial solvency. In the process, Korin created what is now revered as a National Treasure of Japan.
Painstaking skill, incredible focus and devotion to time-honored artistic traditions were the means by which Korin achieved his goal. But he did not do it alone.
Korin worked with a team of craftsmen. These artisans performed a staggering amount of labor preparing the special paper on which Koren worked and the delicate gold leaf that was used for the background of the irises he painted.
In his chapter on Ogata Korin in The Secrets of Painting, Lachlan Goudie describes how the fragile sheets of gold leaf were created. There were 120 squares of gold leaf for each panel, 1,500 for the entire expanse of the pair of folding screens. Each square of gold leaf was hammered 10,000 times into a sheet "so thin that that the slightest breath would cause it to tear."
Once the gold leaf had been applied to the panels, could Korin begin to paint the sketched images of the iris flowers in deep blue and violet. This was the culminating step in the exacting process by which Korin and his team of artisans nurtured the iris garden into "full bloom."
Goudie is a painter himself - and a fine one - so he appreciates the singular role of the masterpiece-creating artist. Singular but not solitary.
Many of the painters chronicled in The Secrets of Painting presided over busy workshops just as Ogata Korin did in Japan. Giotto, painting the great fresco narative of the lives of Jesus and his mother, Mary, for the Arena Chapel in Padua, 1303-1305, was one notable example of this group approach to art. Duccio's The Maestà, created in Siena, a few years later, was another.
Duccio and his talented helpers featured in the wonderful 2024 exhibition, Siena, the Rise of Painting, presented by the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the National Gallery in London.
Among the highlights of Siena, the Rise of Painting was the reunion of a sequence of narrative panel paintings which had been detached from the main image of the Virgin Mary and the Christ Child on the Maestà during the 1700's. One of these predella panels, The Healing of the Man Born Blind, served as the focus of Goudie's attention in the chapter on Duccio.
After learning everything there is to know about late-medieval art practice, Goudie rolled-up his sleeves and tried to replicate the process used by Duccio and his assistants to create the Maestà. In a fascinating and readily understandable discourse, Goudie describes his own efforts at painting with the egg tempera paint used by Duccio and gilding and burnishing a halo with gold leaf.
This was not a one-time experiment. In the first chapter of The Secrets of Painting, Goudie tried his hand at prehistoric rock painting, replicating animal images from the Chauvet Cave murals dating to over 30,000 years ago. With incredible versatility, Goudie performed similar "experiments" on iconic works of art ranging from the Fayum mummy portraits of ancient Egypt to David Hockney's iPad drawings.
In his final chapter, Goudie discusses Artificial Intelligence (AI) generated imagery. He is cautiously optimistic, writing that AI will "distill, reinvent and master the secrets of painting ... a prospect both mesmerizing and unsettling in equal measure."
The Secrets of Painting contains numerous examples of discoveries or technical innovations which have enabled artists to transcend challenges and make personal leaps of creative genius. Here are two which offer encouraging evidence that Goudie's hopes for AI are not unfounded.
Alma Thomas was an African-American woman who taught art in the segregated school system of Washington D.C., beginning in 1925. When she retired in 1960, Thomas planned to devote her considerable talents to art full-time. Almost immediately, she began suffering from extreme arthritis. After making a partial recovery, Thomas resumed painting with water-based acrylic paint. Much easier to use than oils, acrylic paints enabled Thomas to cope with her physical limitations and create brilliant abstract paintings like Blast Off (1970).
A century earlier, oil paints, available in a recently-invented format, extended the mobility of a group of intrepid French artists, one of whom was a young woman named Berthe Morisot.
Berthe Morisot was in many ways the most radical of the group, soon to be called Impressionists. Morisot focused, not on careful depictions of the landscape before her easel, but on light itself. She sought to show how light radiantly transforms the world around us. To succeed, Morisot had to be quick about it.
Morisot's "apprentices" were metal paint tubes, filled with already mixed pigment, and sealed with screw-on lids. An American inventor, John Goffe Rand, had patented these tubes in 1841. These labor-saving paint tubes enabled Morisot to work with the speed and skill necessary to achieve striking visual effects. The Impressionist Revolution had truly begun.
In a key passage in his book, Goudie writes:
At every step in art history the evolution of painting materials has been accompanied by changes in artistic style and technique. Was it the artists who demanded new materials to express their unconventional ideas, or did new schools of painting evolve in response to the discoveries of scientists working in their laboratories?
Today, as humankind makes its first ventures into the Age of AI, the above questions are taking on ever greater significance. It's not merely a case of looking before we leap. Essential issues of human identity and what constitutes true art are involved.
Lachlan Goudie's The Secrets of Painting is subtitled "the hidden art of the masterpiece from prehistory to today." This outstanding book is also required reading - and reflecting - on where the world of art is headed tomorrow.
***
Text: Copyright of Ed Voves, all rights reserved Original Photographs: Copyright of Anne Lloyd, all rights reserved.
Introductory Image: Ancient Egyptian paint brushes. New Kingdom, 18th dynasty, ca. 1550-1292 B.C. Collection of the British Museum.EA 36893, 36892, 36889; Painter's Palette Inscribed with the Name of King Amenhotep III, ca. 1390-1353 B.C. From Egypt. Ivory, pigment, 6 7/8 x 1 3/4 x 3/8 in. (17.5 x 4.4 x .9 cm). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York,
Anne Lloyd, Photo (2026) Photos of Iris flowers, Philadelphia, PA.
Ogata Korin (Japanese, 1658-1716) Irises, c. 1701-1704. Pair of folding screens in ink, color and gold on paper, each screen measuring 59 1/2 x 141 1/4 in. (151.2 x 358.8 cm.) Nezu Museum, Tokyo.
Cover art of of The Secrets of Painting by Lachlan Goudie, 2026. Courtesy of Thames & Hudson
Ed Voves, Photo (2024) Gallery view of the Siena, the Rise of Painting exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Oct. 13, 2024 - Jan. 26, 2025.
Duccio di Buoninsegna (Italian, died 1318/19) The Healing of the Man Born Blind. Tempera on wood: 17 3/4 x 18 3/8 in. (45.1 x 46.7 cm.) National Gallery, London.
Jack Whitten, Photo (1972) Photograph of Alma Thomas at the opening of her exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, 1972. Photo print: b&w, 13 x 9 cm. Alma Thomas papers, circa 1894-2001. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.
Alma Thomas (American, 1891-1978) Blast Off, Acrylic on canvas: 6 ft. x 4 ft.4 in. (182.9 x 131.1 cm.) Collection of the National Air and Space Museum, Washington D.C.
Unknown photographer(19th century) Portrait of Berthe Morisot. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Morisot_berthe_photo.jpg
Winsor and Newton Paint Tube, Victorian era. https://www.winsornewton.com/pages/about-us
Berthe Morisot (French, 1841‐1895) Summer's Day,1879. Oil on canvas:45.7 x 75.2 cm (18 x 29 1/8 in.) National Gallery, London.
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