The Agency of Paint: Between Intention, Matter, and Perception
Painting has often been imagined as the place where an artist’s intention meets the viewer’s perception, a closed circuit between maker and beholder. What is less frequently acknowledged is the third partner in that circuit: the material itself. Paint is not a neutral vehicle for ideas but a recalcitrant, suggestive, and often unpredictable collaborator. It carries within it chemistry, history, and resistance, qualities that ensure it does more than passively submit to artistic will. To recognise this is to speak of the agency of paint, and to understand painting not as domination but as negotiation.
This argument is central to my developing doctoral research project, Granularity, Agency, and the Pedagogy of Becoming. If granularity refers to the smallest thresholds in painting, then agency refers to the way those thresholds participate actively in the making of meaning. Agency is not singular but distributed, emerging in the interplay between the painter’s decision, the material’s behaviour, and the viewer’s interpretation. In my postgraduate lab PRIMER, this principle is tested through exercises that teach painters to listen to paint rather than to command it, to discover how meaning arises from reciprocity rather than imposition.
The myth of mastery in Western art education has often obscured this point. In the academies of the nineteenth century, mastery meant erasing all trace of facture, disciplining paint into illusion. Yet painters from the very beginning have known better. Leonardo wrote of finding images in stains and clouds, places where control gave way to emergence. Titian, in his late work, allowed paint to smear and dissolve, producing figures that hover between clarity and dissolution. For Rembrandt, the thick impasto of lead white is as much flesh as it is paint, reminding us that materiality does not disappear into representation but insists upon its presence. In the twentieth century this became undeniable. For de Kooning, the drag of a brush across a resistant canvas was not an obstacle but the event itself; for Joan Mitchell, colour carried the speed and hesitation of the hand, mediated through the absorbency of the ground and the drying time of the medium.
To look at painting in this way is to recognise agency as threefold. Every mark begins in the painter’s decision, yet no decision is pure, for the behaviour of pigment and ground immediately answers back. The viewer then completes the process, bridging gaps, misreading accidents as intentions, and embedding cultural associations into perception. Agency belongs not to the painter alone but to the space of negotiation between all three. The result is that a Rembrandt impasto or a Mitchell gesture is not authored singly but emerges from this distributed field.
This field is further shaped by what the exhibition Slow Painting (2019) called a scopic regime, a system that structures not only what is seen but how it is seen.¹ Ingres, with his seamless surfaces, offers a regime of clarity, where paint’s agency is suppressed and the viewer’s role reduced to compliance. Cézanne, by contrast, leaves planes open, strokes contradictory, compelling the viewer to negotiate coherence. Each work sets its own economy of looking, its own contract of agency, determined at the level of facture. To understand agency in painting is therefore to recognise that it is epistemic as well as aesthetic. It teaches us to tolerate ambiguity, to recognise that knowledge is often negotiated rather than imposed.
In the studio this has profound pedagogical implications. Students often arrive with the belief that painting is about control: the paint must do what they want. When it resists, when edges blur, when colours muddy, they take this as failure. Yet those moments are often the richest, because they expose paint’s capacity to intervene. In PRIMER I encourage students to explore this directly. We stain absorbent grounds to observe how pigment separates, we overload brushes to watch bristles split under pressure, we juxtapose oil and water to produce incompatibility. These are not tricks but means of learning that paint is an active agent. By working with rather than against this agency, students begin to understand painting as a practice of becoming, where knowledge is not transmitted whole but discovered through negotiation.
Art history offers abundant confirmation. Vermeer relied on the optical scattering of ultramarine and lead-tin yellow, allowing the granular shimmer of particles to create illusions beyond line. Velázquez, in Las Meninas, flicked strokes so open they approach abstraction, yet the viewer reads presence into them. Constable’s skies and Turner’s storms relied upon turbulence in paint itself, while Pollock and Mitchell foregrounded viscosity, gravity, and gesture. Richter scraped across surfaces until accident became image, while Saville gouged paint into flesh, forcing the beholder to oscillate between matter and meaning. In every case, meaning arises not solely from intention but from a willingness to let paint assert itself.
In our present culture of digital images, this insight is more urgent than ever. Algorithmic pictures are frictionless, endlessly smooth, devoid of resistance. Their authority lies in repetition without remainder. Painting insists on the opposite. Its very vitality comes from resistance — drag, opacity, granularity. Each mark records not perfection but negotiation, not certainty but encounter. To stand before a scraped Richter canvas or a scarred Saville surface is to confront the agency of matter itself, something irreducible to code or simulation.
To speak of the agency of paint, then, is to acknowledge that painting is not authored by the artist alone. It is the outcome of collaboration between hand, matter, and eye. For art history, this reframes facture as distributed authorship. For pedagogy, it trains students to see resistance not as error but as invitation. For philosophy, it aligns painting with broader debates on material agency and distributed cognition. For my doctoral research, it offers a way of thinking about painting as a practice of becoming, where every mark embodies not certainty but relation.
This is also where the idea of technē becomes crucial. Technē has too often been reduced to the practical craft of making, as if it were a mere toolkit of methods. But in painting, technē is also the act of deciding — the moment where intention and material meet in choice. To select a pigment, to accept an accident, to leave a stroke unresolved: these are not simply technical operations but epistemic decisions. Each embodies a stance toward control, openness, and meaning. When seen in this light, technē is not a matter of applying skill to matter but of entering into judgement with it, a negotiation that is both practical and philosophical.
Martin Kinnear, The Entropic Pull of Matter over Memory Series, 2024, mixed media with limestone dust, chalk, and oil, Royal College of Art. In Heidegger’s sense of technē as a mode of revealing rather than mere craft, the work enacts technēsis: every mark both a gesture of making and a decision to let matter disclose itself. The entropic surface resists closure, refusing representation as finality and instead holding open the negotiation between memory, perception, and material truth.
To extend the argument: if granularity names the site of facture and agency names its negotiation, then technē names the act of choosing within that negotiation. It is how painting becomes not only an art of making but an art of thinking. The smallest adjustments — more medium, less pressure, a refusal to overpaint — are decisions that embody an entire relation to material and to meaning. Painting thus becomes a model of how knowledge itself is made: not through the imposition of certainty but through the orchestration of choices at the threshold of resistance.
It is in this sense that I introduce a tentative working term from my studio practice and developing thesis, technēsis: the lived moment where technē becomes epistemic, where making is inseparable from deciding. Technēsis describes the painter’s condition of working in uncertainty, where every brushstroke is both action and judgement. It is not merely a matter of executing technique but of inhabiting the negotiation between hand, matter, and perception. To describe painting as technēsis is to emphasise its status as a thinking practice: one in which knowledge is not applied from outside but generated through the act itself.
This framing also illuminates my own practice, particularly in the series The Entropic Pull of Matter over Memorymade at the Royal College of Art. In these works, porous surfaces of limestone dust, chalk, and oil were left open to suggestion, producing pareidolic effects that both invited and resisted meaning. To work in this way was to accept technēsis: to allow the act of painting to decide alongside me, to accept instability as a condition of meaning. Here the concept is not abstract but lived, embedded in the facture of the canvas itself. The viewer, encountering these unstable surfaces, is drawn into the same negotiation: to see and unsee, to decide and undecide, to inhabit the porous zone between matter and memory.
The agency of paint reminds us that painting matters not because it resolves easily but because it doesn’t. Its vitality lies in friction, in ambiguity, in negotiation. To paint is to enter into relationship — with matter, with history, with perception — and technēsis is the way we navigate that relationship, as both making and deciding. The lesson, for painter and viewer alike, is that knowledge is not delivered whole but assembled, mark by mark, in the unstable space between hand and surface.
References
Martin Herbert (ed.), Slow Painting (Hayward Gallery Touring, 2019).
Ernst Gombrich, Art & Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation (London, 1960).
Clement Greenberg, Art and Culture: Critical Essays (Boston, 1961).
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).
Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York, 1994).
Margaret Livingstone, Vision and Art: The Biology of Seeing (New York, 2002).