MARGUS VEISVEER - Blog #visual effects

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

A Painting You Can Get Addicted to Looking At

Mon, 24 Aug 2026 07:16:03 +0200

And the longer I look, the more I discover

Calling it “a kind of addiction” may actually be quite appropriate - although, psychologically speaking, I do not mean addiction in the clinical sense.

There is something peculiar about this painting. The closer I look, the less it seems to be exhausted by looking. Instead, it keeps revealing something new.

The eye moves from one microstructure to another: a blue flow, small forms appearing between lighter layers, raised surfaces, reflections, green structures, the direction of pigment movement. And every new discovery creates another question:

What else is there?

It can create a simple cycle:

You look. You notice something new. There is a small moment of discovery. Your eye moves further. You find something even more unexpected. And you want to look again. You stay in front of the painting.

With this particular painting technique, this is especially important. The visual information does not exist only in the composition. It also exists at the microscopic level of the surface.

A painting can often be viewed as a whole, and after some time you may feel that you have “read” it. You understand its structure, its visual language, its relationships.

Here, something different happens. The closer you get, the more visual information appears. And there is an enormous amount of it when the painting measures 120 × 80 cm.

There is another interesting aspect to this

I know how this surface was created. I know how the pigment moved, how the layers came together, how I directed the paint. And yet, when I look at the finished surface, even I can see things that I did not consciously plan while painting. The movement and merging of pigments, together with structures created during the drying process, form something that begins to behavelike an independent system. So I am not simply looking at something I made.

In a strange way, I am discovering it after it has already been born. And the longer I look, the more I discover. This becomes particularly obvious in these photographs.

They show details of the painting measuring only about 7 × 7 cm. I do not see them simply as fragments of a blue abstract surface. Why?

Because at a certain point, some areas begin to resemble an underwater landscape. Others look like geological layers. Still others resemble some enormous biological structure seen under extreme magnification.

And when the distance between the eye and the surface changes, what the image actually is seems to change with it. From about 1.5 meters away, it almost disappears into the whole. Go closer, and suddenly it is there again.

Perhaps this is why I would describe the experience as a kind of visual addiction - or perhaps more precisely, as a perceptual pull.

And in art, I think this can be a valuable phenomenon.

Because if a painting keeps forcing even its own maker to look again and again, then perhaps there is something happening there that cannot be reduced simply to composition, beautiful color, or the formal logic of painting. The painting begins to behave like a living visual environment.

A place you can enter. A place where you could remain for hours. You only have to move closer. A painting is not only something to look at. It is something to explore.

Directing Pigment Instead of Applying Paint

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 07:30:04 +0200

I direct pigment

One of the questions I am asked most often concerns the surface of my paintings. People wonder why it looks different. The answer is surprisingly simple: I do not think of oil painting as applying paint to a canvas. I think of it as directing pigment.

Directing pigment instead of applying paint.

Traditional descriptions of oil painting usually speak about applying paint to the canvas. That description has never felt entirely accurate for my own work. Over time, I realized that what I actually do is not apply paint - I direct pigment.

This distinction may seem subtle, but it fundamentally changes the way I think about painting.

During the painting process, pigment is consciously guided through thousands of micro-movements. Its movement is redirected, slowed down, accelerated, gathered, and redirected again. Rather than building a surface by adding texture, I shape the movement of the pigment until the structure begins to emerge naturally.

It is the consequence of controlled pigment movement.

The visible texture is therefore not the objective. It is the consequence of controlled pigment movement.

When people first see my paintings, they often focus on the image itself. Only after looking more closely do they begin to notice the countless microscopic decisions recorded on the surface. Every shift in direction, every transition between transparency and opacity, and every accumulation of pigment results from deliberate decisions made throughout the painting process.

This has led me to ask a simple question: Who else paints in this way?

Despite considerable searching, I have not yet found a documented oil painting methodology that describes pigment being consciously directed through repeated micro-movements in this way. Similar visual effects certainly exist throughout art history, and several artists have explored related ideas. However, I have not found a documented technique in which directing pigment itself forms the central working principle.

That does not prove that no one else has ever worked this way. Art history is far too vast for such absolute statements. But it does suggest that this approach has not become a recognised or widely described painting methodology.

If you know of an artist who works using a genuinely comparable process, I would be very interested to learn about it. Dialogue and comparison are essential parts of artistic development.

For now, this way of working has become inseparable from my own practice. It is not about inventing a new style or following a trend. It is simply the result of decades of searching for a more precise way to control the behaviour of pigment and to allow the image to emerge from that process.

Perhaps that is what has gradually become the Veisveer method.