MARGUS VEISVEER - Blog #vision

From Applying Paint to Directing Pigment

Tue, 01 Sep 2026 07:08:59 +0200

These developments are important

The history of modern painting can also be understood as a gradual transformation in the relationship between the artist, paint and the surface. What changes is not only the appearance of the painting, but the way in which the medium is allowed to act.

With Jackson Pollock, paint was no longer simply applied to the canvas with a brush. It could be dripped, poured and splashed, while the movement of the artist's body became part of the painting process. The trajectory of the paint emerged from the interaction between gesture, gravity, distance and chance. Pollock fundamentally expanded the possibilities of how paint could reach the surface.

Helen Frankenthaler moved the process further away from conventional application. In her soak-stain method, highly diluted paint was allowed to flow into and become absorbed by the unprimed canvas. The surface was no longer merely a support onto which paint was placed; it became an active participant in the formation of the image. The behavior of the liquid medium and its relationship with the fabric became central to the work.

Morris Louis developed another form of this shift. His poured and stained paintings allowed highly fluid paint to move across and through the canvas, with gravity and the physical properties of the medium playing a decisive role. Rather than constructing an image through conventional brushwork, Louis created conditions in which the paint itself could establish the structure of the painting.

Gerhard Richter introduced yet another decisive change through his use of the squeegee. Instead of building the image primarily through individual brushstrokes, he could drag, displace, mix and partially remove entire layers of paint across the surface. The squeegee became a means of transforming the behavior of the paint after it had been placed on the canvas. Control and chance could operate simultaneously: the artist initiated and directed the process, while the exact result remained partly unpredictable.

These developments are important because each of them moved painting further away from the simple model of applying paint to a surface. The artist increasingly worked with the physical behavior of the medium itself.

Directing Pigment proposes a further shift

The essential distinction is not the invention of a particular tool. A tool is only a means. It may be a brush, a blade, an elastic instrument, a specially constructed object, or something that was never intended as an artistic tool at all. What matters is not what the artist uses to move the pigment, but how the pigment is affected and how its movement is consciously directed.

In this approach, pigment is not merely applied, poured, stained or displaced. Its movement becomes the subject of active control.

The artist can influence the direction, pressure, speed, accumulation, dispersion and interaction of pigment through a sequence of deliberate movements. The process may contain unpredictability, but unpredictability is no longer simply something that happens to the painting. It becomes something the artist works with through continuous physical intervention.

This also means that Directing Pigment is not a fixed visual style. Two artists using the same principle could arrive at completely different results, because each could develop an individual way of directing pigment. The tool therefore becomes secondary to the method, and the method becomes capable of generating different artistic languages.

This distinction is particularly significant in oil painting. Oil paint has traditionally been understood primarily through its application: brushwork, layering, glazing, impasto, scraping and other established ways of placing and manipulating paint on the surface. Directing Pigment shifts the emphasis from the application of paint to the controlled movement of pigment itself.

That shift opens another field of possibilities for oil painting

"That shift opens another field of possibilities for oil painting."

It allows the medium to be investigated not only as something that carries color, but as a physical material whose movement, distribution and structure can be deliberately shaped. The resulting optical effects can move beyond what conventional application-based oil painting normally produces, creating new relationships between transparency, density, diffusion, surface and light.

In this sense, Directing Pigment is not proposed as another individual technique within the existing vocabulary of painting. It is proposed as an open method: a principle that other artists could interpret through their own tools, movements and intentions.

The tool does not define the method. The artist's relationship with the movement of pigment does.

What the Oil Painting Can Still Become

Wed, 26 Aug 2026 09:18:48 +0200

The instruction was simple: step back and look.

For centuries, painting has taught us how to look.

Usually, a painting is meant to be viewed from a certain distance. Step back, and the image becomes whole. Impressionism made this especially evident: up close, the painting breaks into separate strokes and patches of color; step away, and they merge into an image. The instruction was simple: step back and look. My paintings ask for the opposite.

Step closer. And closer still.

Step closer. And closer still. Photo: Artemida

Come so close that your nose is almost touching the canvas. Look into the surface. Examine it. Move across it. Stay with it.

What appears at that distance is not merely detail.

It is another painting. And then another. And another.

Come so close that your nose is almost touching the canvas. Photo: Artemida

A single canvas can contain dozens, even hundreds, of distinct visual events and structures. They do not exist as separate paintings placed beside one another. They exist simultaneously within the same surface, becoming visible at different distances and through different acts of looking.

In this sense, the painting becomes almost like a gallery contained within a single canvas.

This is not an effect produced by adding more detail. It comes from the way the pigment itself is handled.

I call my process directing pigment rather than applying paint. Pigment is repeatedly directed through micro-movements - its flow is turned, slowed, accelerated, gathered and redistributed. The resulting surface is not simply textured. It contains trajectories, densities, interruptions and microscopic relationships that continue to reveal themselves as the viewer approaches.

This changes not only what can be seen, but how the painting must be seen.

The traditional question has often been: What is the right distance from which to view this painting?

My paintings do not have one right distance.

They require movement.

From far away, you encounter the whole. Closer, the surface begins to separate into other structures. Closer still, those structures become worlds of their own. The painting does not change when you move toward it. What changes is how much of the painting becomes visible.

Detail of painting, 4 x 4 cm. What is the right distance from which to view this painting?

This is where I believe something important has happened within the medium of oil painting.

For much of the last century, painting has repeatedly questioned itself: its subject, its image, its materiality, its relevance and even its necessity. Many artists have turned toward new media because oil painting can appear to be a medium whose possibilities have already been exhausted.

I do not believe that. I believe oil painting is still an open system. Its history is not finished.

This is not watercolor, but oil painting. Not painting, but directing pigment. You would normally see transitions like these in watercolor, but I create them with oil. What emerges is a completely new viewing experience - something that does not occur in oil painting in this form.

I am not interested in abandoning the medium in search of something newer. I am interested in discovering what the old medium can still become.

The possibility lies not necessarily in inventing another style, another image or another surface effect, but in changing the fundamental relationship between pigment, surface and perception.

If painting can contain not one image but hundreds of independently discoverable visual experiences, then the canvas is no longer simply a window onto something.

It becomes a space to enter.

And perhaps this is the next question for oil painting:

Not how much more can we put onto the canvas - but how much more can the canvas reveal?

It becomes a space to enter. Photo: Artemida

Beyond the Intermediate: Can Painting Move Beyond Modernism?

Wed, 19 Aug 2026 07:53:30 +0200

Perhaps it needs another condition

There is a strange moment in the history of painting when one begins to wonder whether painting has already passed through too many lives. It has been academic, romantic, impressionist, expressionist, abstract, conceptual, deconstructed, revived and repeatedly declared dead. Yet somehow, it keeps returning to the canvas. So what is left for painting to do?

Perhaps the answer is not to invent another style, but to change the conditions under which a painting comes into being.

For me, this question has gradually become more important than the question of style itself. I work with oil paint, a medium burdened with an enormous history. It carries the memory of landscape, portraiture, light and illusion. It carries Monet, Turner, Van Gogh, Picasso and countless others who have already pushed it in directions that once seemed impossible. Yet the medium itself has not necessarily exhausted its possibilities. Perhaps we have simply been looking at it from the same side.

There is an interesting gap between what we call modern painting and what we call contemporary art. Modernism transformed the visual language of painting, gradually separating colour from description, surface from illusion, gesture from representation. Later, contemporary art often moved further away from painting itself, allowing the idea, process or context surrounding an artwork to become more important than the painted image. Somewhere between these worlds lies a peculiar territory: painting knows everything that happened before it, but no longer has to behave according to the rules established by any of those periods.

This is where I find myself increasingly interested - not in leaving painting behind, but in asking whether painting can pass through its own history without remaining trapped inside it.

Traditionally, we tend to think of a painting as something that depicts something. A landscape depicts a landscape. An abstract painting may depict nothing recognisable, but still presents itself as a finished composition. But what if the visible image is only one temporary condition of the painting? What if colour, gesture, light, surface and time are not simply tools used to produce an image, but forces that produce the image themselves?

This changes the position of the artist. The artist does not necessarily apply paint in order to construct a predetermined picture. The artist can create conditions in which pigment is directed, interrupted, accumulated, displaced and allowed to form relationships that could not have been completely predicted beforehand. The painter becomes less of an illustrator of an idea and more of a director of a process. The writer directs a flow of words. The artist directs a flow of pigment. What finally appears on the canvas is the consequence of that direction.

This does not mean surrendering control. Quite the opposite. The more open the process becomes, the more precisely the artist has to understand when to intervene. A mark can destroy a balance. Another layer can make a surface meaningless. One vertical interruption can suddenly change the spatial logic of an entire painting. At a certain point, the artist is no longer simply adding. The artist is deciding what must not be added.

This is where time becomes part of the work. A painting may appear finished while still containing a possibility for another movement. A surface may change under different light, in a different space or from a different distance. The painting therefore has no single, absolute appearance. It has conditions. Perhaps this is one of the places where painting can move beyond some of the assumptions inherited from modernism - not by becoming more complicated, but by becoming less fixed.

This is one reason the idea of Collapse has become important in my recent work. Collapse does not necessarily mean destruction. It can also mean the moment when an existing structure stops being sufficient. After a collapse, something may disappear, but something else becomes possible precisely because the previous structure is no longer holding everything in place.

After Collapse therefore does not have to be understood as a painting of catastrophe. It can be understood as a painting that exists after the collapse of a particular way of seeing. The landscape may still be there. Colour may still be there. The marks, surfaces and spatial suggestions may still refer to things we recognise. But the relationship between them has changed. The painting does not necessarily tell us what happened. It asks what kind of image is possible afterwards.

I have used the term Teleexpressionism to describe part of this territory. But perhaps it is misleading to think of it simply as another artistic style. A style usually tells us what something looks like. I am increasingly interested in something that describes how an image moves through time, context and perception. A form can belong to one reality and appear in another. A landscape can contain the memory of a landscape that no longer exists. An object can become a sign, a sign can become a visual disturbance, and a disturbance can become the beginning of a new spatial order.

The painting is then not simply representing a place or an object. It is transposing visual information between different conditions. Perhaps this is why the paintings can sometimes feel recognisable and unfamiliar at the same time. They are not intended to be surreal. They are not necessarily abstract either. They occupy an unstable position between recognition and transformation.

There is, of course, a danger here. If a painting requires too much explanation, something may have gone wrong. A work should not depend on the artist standing beside it and providing the missing instructions. At the same time, I do not believe that every painting needs to be immediately understood. There is a difference between not understanding something and having nothing to discover. The first can be productive; the second is simply empty.

I am more interested in the moment when a viewer recognises something - a colour, a space, a structure, perhaps even a landscape - and then realises that recognition is not enough. Something remains unresolved. The painting continues after the first impression. Perhaps this is where contemporary painting still has an enormous possibility: not in making itself easier to understand, nor in making itself more obscure, but in creating a situation in which understanding can remain incomplete.

I do not think painting needs to escape its history. Nor do I think it is useful to claim that one has simply jumped over modernism, postmodernism or everything that came before. There are no clean jumps in art. There are connections, detours, pauses and unexpected returns. A painting may carry traces of Impressionism without being Impressionist. It may carry the freedom of abstraction without becoming abstract. It may use conceptual thinking without ceasing to be a painting. It may even carry the memory of older forms while pointing towards something that has not yet acquired a name.

Perhaps this is the real journey: not a flight from the past, but a movement through it without permanently landing anywhere.

And perhaps painting does not need another revolution. Perhaps it needs another condition.

A different relationship between pigment and image. Between control and emergence. Between what is seen and what is remembered. Between the painting as an object and the painting as an event. I do not know whether this is a new direction for painting. I would rather leave that question open.

But if painting can still move through its history, carry all of it with it, and nevertheless arrive somewhere that does not quite belong to any of the places it has already visited - then perhaps the journey is not over yet.

Thoughts on Art

Sat, 08 Aug 2026 10:05:12 +0200

BEYOND SEEING

My Ten Theses on Becoming an Artist

8 August 2026

Recognition does not play as great a role as it is often given credit for. It may bring joy, but only for a moment. True happiness lies in one’s own development.

Perfection is not the end of development. Once a work is finished, we begin to see its flaws. The next one will be better. That is development. That is happiness.

Those who simply copy become dependent on what they see. A realist may be an excellent copier, but that does not make them a true artist. They remain dependent on the visible world.

You cannot truly paint water, a gust of wind, or the splash of a wave directly from nature, because they change too quickly. The artist has to create them - to conceive the image rather than simply copy what is in front of them.

The Impressionists tried to capture the impression of nature as quickly as possible. You can paint in front of nature for three years, yet the best work may still emerge in the studio, from memory. A viewer cannot remain indefinitely with an impression, because an impression is a moment - much like scrolling on a phone, where another already “painted” impression immediately appears.

A better work is one that makes you stop and look for a long time. A truly strong work invites you to look again. And even then, it is not a perfect work.

The works that can hold our attention for a long time are often those created from memory and imagination.

Water is a living force that human beings cannot control. Not even the artist. We can only direct the pigment. I try to understand how water behaves. My task is to convey something that direct imitation of nature cannot capture.

Imitating other artists harms an artist’s independent development. You can certainly learn technique from another artist, but everything else must come from your own observation and your own artistic impression.

I do not consider an artist’s talent to be the ability to see something accurately. I consider it to be what they are able to retain after the act of seeing is over - and what they are able to discover from it.