The Artist’s Studio: The Affair of Art and Film

Abstract

Jonson’s list of ingredients evokes the weird and marvelous world of the alchemist: the magician who could take these macabre and banal materials and through his knowledge and power turn them into gold. The enduring image of the alchemist’s laboratory, where this transmutation takes place, has become a metaphor for other forms of mysterious creativity and is, one suspects, behind prevailing myths of artistic creativity and our ongoing fascination with the artist’s studio as the alchemic site of artistic transformation. Alchemy was a heady mixture of philosophy, art, and science, the precursor of modern chemistry, and the stuff of the creative imagination. It dealt with illusions, with things not being what they seemed, and with sight’s fallibility in comprehending the true nature of objects. The ultimate goal of the alchemist was the transmutation of matter, of base materials, to gold, and it was this process of transformation and its questioning of the physical universe through formal experimentation that made alchemy an art as much as a science.

Hair o’ the head, burnt clouts, chalk, merds, and clay,

Powder of bones, scalings of iron, glass,

And worlds of other strange ingredients,

Would burst a man to name

Ben Jonson, The Alchemist, 1612