Hardcover. NY, Routledge, 1st, 1999, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, price-clipped dust jacket, 246 pages, color and b&w illustrations. Unlike many books on painting that usually talk about art or painters, James Elkins' compelling and original work focuses on alchemy, for like the alchemist, the painter seeks to transform and be transformed by the medium. James Elkins communicates the experience of painting beyond the traditional vocabulary of art history. Alchemy provides a magical language to explore what it is a painter really does in her or his studio - the smells, the mess, the struggle to control the uncontrollable, the special knowledge only painters hold of how colours will mix, and how they will look. Clean copy.
