Granularity in Paint: Why Every Mark Matters
The concept of granularity provides a productive way of thinking about painting today. By granularity I mean the smallest operative units in a painting — pigment particles, brushstrokes, surface textures — and the perceptual thresholds at which these units are apprehended as matter or image. It is at this level that painting mediates between artist, material, and viewer, and where agency in painting is most directly negotiated.
This idea lies at the centre of my developing doctoral research project, Granularity, Agency, and the Pedagogy of Becoming, which asks how material thresholds in painting can act not only as aesthetic events but also as models for pedagogy. My argument is that by observing how paint becomes image, we can also rethink how learning becomes knowledge. The project is tested in practice through PRIMER, my postgraduate studio-lab, where material experimentation is treated simultaneously as a technical method and as a way of thinking.
The notion itself is not without precedent. Ernst Gombrich described the “beholder’s share,” in which incomplete marks solicit perceptual completion from the viewer.¹ Clement Greenberg insisted on “truth to materials,” where facture resists illusionism.² Gilles Deleuze, writing from a different angle, framed difference and repetition as the productive play of micro-variation.³ Each of these accounts, in their different registers, points to granularity as more than a technical detail: it is the threshold where materiality and meaning converge.
Rembrandt van Rijn, The Jewish Bride (detail), c.1665, oil on canvas, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. In this late work, the dense impasto of lead white and ochre enacts what Ernst Gombrich called the “beholder’s share”: the granular facture solicits completion by the viewer, embodying the porous threshold between matter and image.
Rembrandt demonstrates this with particular force. In his late works, such as The Jewish Bride, the paint becomes palpably material: a sleeve may be rendered with smears of ochre and scumbled white that collapse into abstraction at close range, yet from a distance fuse into tenderness. The viewer is not passive but must move, reposition, and negotiate between matter and image. Granularity here is not an accident but the means of soliciting participation. Constable’s oil sketches of the sky extend the principle further. His dabs and flicks of lead white and grey are not only descriptive but mimetic of turbulence: they behave like weather, never fixed, always unsettled. Turner went further still, experimenting with resins and bitumen whose granular instability produced cracks and blooms. These were not failures but new kinds of atmospheric truth, where material accident became indistinguishable from visual effect. In sculpture, Emily Young embraces geological granularity — fissures and faults remain visible, absorbed into the figure, so that stone itself seems to breathe.
But the story is not confined to rough facture. Vermeer, often considered the paragon of smooth finish, also relied on granularity, though of a subtler kind. His use of ultramarine and lead-tin yellow produces shimmering optical granularity at the pigment level. Seen up close, a Vermeer surface is alive with particles that scatter light; the illusion of stillness is built from granular vibration. Likewise, Ingres, champion of line and clarity, suppresses granularity so thoroughly that his paintings can feel hermetic. Here, granularity becomes an absence, a denial of facture, and in that denial lies another kind of agency — an insistence that meaning lies wholly in outline, not in matter.
Granularity, then, is not synonymous with roughness. It is the degree to which matter is allowed to speak, whether in thick impasto, granular pigment scatter, or even in its suppression. Impressionism provides a case in point. Monet’s broken brushstrokes and Renoir’s flickering touches rely on granular facture to capture fleeting light. Yet when academic painters of the same period smoothed their surfaces to perfection, granularity was suppressed, and with it the vitality of perception. Abstract Expressionism rediscovered the principle with force: Pollock’s drips, de Kooning’s slashes, and Joan Mitchell’s vibrating fields all foreground granularity as both image and event.
For painters today, these moments are not only art historical curiosities but also pedagogical exemplars. A granular stroke is never simply “finished”: it is transitional, an opening between control and resistance. In my teaching, whether at the Royal College of Art or through PRIMER, I encourage students to think of granularity as the ground floor of painting. We experiment with pigment choice — smooth ultramarine against Cerulean blue, transparent versus opaque — and with grounds, noting how absorbency changes the weight of colour. We attend to stroke pressure, scale, and drag, and ask whether a mark insists on clarity or dissolves into ambiguity.
Martin Kinnear, The Entropic Pull of Matter over Memory (detail), 2024, mixed media with limestone dust, chalk, and oil, Royal College of Art. The granular facture enacts the entropic pull of matter itself, inviting pareidolic suggestion while simultaneously resisting closure into fixed meaning.
What students often discover is that the smallest decisions alter the entire painting. A slight increase in medium can turn a stroke from assertive to evasive. A shift from a chalk ground to an oil ground can transform the way colour sits. Beginners often miss this, believing that a painting fails or succeeds because of subject matter. But when they learn to attend to granularity, they realise that success often lies in these thresholds. For this reason, granularity is not only technical but epistemic: it teaches how small choices accumulate into systems of meaning.
At this point granularity opens into the question of agency. Agency in painting is not unidirectional but distributed. The artist sets intention; the material responds with resistance or accident; the viewer completes perception. The granular is the interface at which this negotiation occurs. If the facture is tightly controlled, the painting reads as illustrative. If it is left open, it reads as ambiguous or participatory.
This negotiation resonates with what the curatorial project Slow Painting (2019) described as a scopic regime: a system that structures not only what is seen, but how it is seen.⁴ The scopic regime of painting is conditioned at the granular level — by facture, opacity and transparency, absorbency and resistance — and these choices establish the visual economy in which artist, material, and viewer interact. To look at a painting “slowly,” as that exhibition urged, is to recognise that agency resides not simply in the finished image, but in the micro-decisions that create the conditions of its visibility.
For my developing doctoral project, this has significant implications. If granularity is the interface of agency, then pedagogy can be reframed around teaching students to negotiate thresholds rather than to imitate outcomes. This is precisely the approach tested in PRIMER, where exercises in facture, porosity, and range become laboratories of thought. Students learn not merely how to paint, but how to orchestrate relationships between control and openness, material and idea. The granular stroke becomes a metaphor for the act of becoming: provisional, relational, and alive.
This is also why granularity continues to matter in the present. In a culture dominated by high-resolution digital images, smoothness is equated with finish, and frictionless surfaces with perfection. The algorithmic image offers no resistance, no trace of hand, no accident. Painting resists this regime. It insists on drag, on opacity, on resistance. Each granular trace testifies to unrepeatable circumstance. Against the endlessly reproducible smoothness of the screen, painting’s granularity asserts singularity and material truth. Even in the age of AI image generation, what remains irreducible is the granular mark: the evidence of negotiation between a body, a material, and a moment.
To think about painting in terms of granularity, then, is to see its smallest marks as thresholds of meaning. For art history, it reframes facture as agency. For pedagogy, it gives students a vocabulary to orchestrate processes rather than mimic results. For philosophy, it situates painting within broader debates on perception, repetition, and difference. And for my developing doctoral research project, it provides a keystone: a way to theorise painting as a practice of becoming, where every granular decision is both material and epistemic. Ultimately, granularity demonstrates that in painting, every mark matters. The vitality of the work emerges not from representation alone but from the granular negotiation between artist, material, and viewer.
References
Ernst Gombrich, Art & Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation (London, 1960).
Clement Greenberg, Art and Culture: Critical Essays (Boston, 1961).
Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York, 1994).
Martin Herbert (ed.), Slow Painting (Hayward Gallery Touring, 2019).
Rosalind Krauss, The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, MA, 1985).
Isabelle Graw, The Love of Painting: Genealogy of a Success Medium (Berlin, 2018).
Margaret Livingstone, Vision and Art: The Biology of Seeing (New York, 2002).