Artist as Alchemist: Painting with Poison, Light, and Soul
- Katerina Miller
- Jul 1
- 12 min read
Updated: Jul 23
Prologue: Why I Wrote This
I’ve always believed that a true artist is more than someone who creates beautiful things. To me, a true artist is a highly developed person—not just technically skilled, but internally evolved. Someone who’s deeply curious about the world and human nature. Someone who doesn’t hide behind arrogance or false certainty, but who stays open—open to research, to contradiction, to mystery. A real artist reshapes their perception constantly and channels it back into the world in the form of something new… or at least, something new enough, because... almost everything has been done already.
This idea led me to Carl Jung’s work, particularly his concept of individuation—the lifelong process of becoming who we truly are. That’s where the name of this blog comes from: The Artist’s Individuation. Jung was famously fascinated with alchemy—not as primitive science, but as metaphor, as symbolic process. He saw the medieval alchemists as spiritual pioneers who externalized their internal transformations through cryptic experiments, obscure symbols, and dangerous materials. And I started to see how artists do something similar.
We use the raw stuff of the psyche—visions, moods, obsessions—and attempt to turn them into something that can live outside us. We seek mastery of materials, but also of meaning. We mix paints like we mix ideas, and what comes out—if we’re lucky—is a kind of psychic artifact.
This idea started growing in me for a while. It got triggered again after a dream I had—about my old chemistry teacher, actually. She was strict, conservative, but respected me despite my “satanic rockstar” teenage aesthetic. In the dream I was struggling with chemistry, frustrated that I’d lost touch with something I once loved. I woke up thinking I’d like to relearn the things I didn’t master back then. And somehow, in the aftermath of that dream, this whole post started to form.
It’s probably no surprise to anyone who knows me that I’m also a devoted Marilyn Manson fan. His influence is everywhere in my work. When I first noticed his alchemical finger tattoos, I felt a jolt of recognition. That’s it. That’s the signal. To me, he embodies the archetype of the artist-alchemist: someone who transmutes culture, trauma, beauty, and filth into art. That finger ink was a sign—that I’m not alone, that I’m on the right track.
So here we are.
This post is about the strange parallels between artists and alchemists—through history, through matter, through psyche. It’s also about pigments, poisons, metaphysics, light, rot, and transcendence. And at its core, maybe this path isn’t about being human at all—but about transcending it.
Welcome to Artist as Alchemist.
Introduction
Through history, the artist has worn many masks: sacred craftsman, outcast visionary, entertainer, priest, revolutionary... They carved gods into stone and summoned ghosts onto walls. They were commissioned by kings and crucified by society. But whether painting cathedrals or daubing blood on cave walls, the artist was never just a decorator of the world—they were a manipulator of meaning. A transformer of matter. A vessel of the invisible.
Likewise, the alchemist was more than a proto-chemist or madman dreaming of gold. At the height
of their cultural power—from ancient Egypt through the Islamic Golden Age to medieval Europe—the alchemist was considered a philosopher of transformation, a seeker of divine pattern in physical substance. While they worked with metals, vapors, and vessels, their true material was the human soul. They encoded cosmic truths in chemical reactions. They believed the world could be transfigured—just as man could.
Alchemy’s roots reach back to the temples of Thoth in Egypt, where it was not yet science or magic, but both. Hermetism—named after the Greek god Hermes Trismegistus—became the secret language of transformation: of the self, of the matter, of the world. Later, as rational science rose and Enlightenment philosophy swept Europe, the figure of the alchemist began to disappear—laughed at, hunted down, or subsumed into chemistry. But did they ever truly vanish? Or did they mutate into something else?
To me, it could very well be the artists.
Let’s return to the moment where that transformation becomes visible—not in secret laboratories, but in the luminous layers of oil paint. I want to use one of my favorite medieval artists, Jan van Eyck, as a vivid example of the fusion between artist and alchemist. Often called the father of oil painting, Jan van Eyck was not just a technician—he was an innovator, an obsessive manipulator of light and matter. While oil painting existed before him, van Eyck elevated it to a spiritual technology. He engineered new recipes, experimented with varnishes and glazes, and turned colored mud into sacred fire. His surfaces glow like wet flesh. His saints shimmer as if backlit by eternity.
This is where the artist becomes an alchemist in the truest sense—not simply for crafting beauty, but for bending matter into illusion, for mastering transformation of the physical into the metaphysical.
In the sections that follow, I’ll dig deeper into the materials, secrets, and even the poisons that ancient artists used—how the paints themselves were volatile, alive, and time-reactive. Painting is not just image-making—but a slow, chemical invocation of something more. A philosopher's stone made of oil, pigment, and will.
I. The Head of It All: Pigment and Technique
Before the metaphysical, before the divine, before even the image—there was pigment.
Whether it’s the shimmering glow of Jan van Eyck’s Annunciation or the raw, brittle beauty of an Egyptian tomb wall, every painting is built upon the same ancient blood: powdered color. Pigment is the head, the origin, the flesh of all painting. Without it, there is nothing to bind, no matter to transfigure. Every technique, from tempera to oil, watercolor to fresco, bows to pigment as its sovereign element.
In the ancient world and well into the Renaissance, the artist did not simply buy a tube and begin. Pigments had to be sought out, extracted, killed, purified, and reanimated. Artists were hunters and executioners of color. They ground their own minerals. They boiled plants and burned bones. Lapis lazuli had to be mined from Afghanistan, azurite from copper veins, vermilion made from toxic mercury. Even soot had its sacred role as lamp black. Each pigment carried with it a story—a cost, a danger, a ritual.
It was this act—of turning raw material into something paintable—that linked the artist to the alchemist.
Alchemists, too, labored with arcane materials. They harvested metals, minerals, salts, and substances believed to contain divine potential. Their goal was not simply gold—but transformation itself. Just like the painter with her pestle, the alchemist crushed and ground, dissolved and purified, trying to awaken the spirit within matter. Their crucibles, their retorts, their furnaces—all echoed the mortar and mixing bowls of the painter’s workshop.
Both the artist and the alchemist were obsessed with Magnum Opus—the Great Work. For the alchemist, it was the Philosopher’s Stone. For the painter, it was the immortal image: a new masterpiece.
Same Pigments, Different Mediums
In tempera, watercolor, and oil alike—the pigments were often the same. What differed was the vehicle, the medium, the soul-fluid that animated dead powder into a living surface.
Tempera, the medieval standard, used egg yolk as its binder. It dried fast, was hard to blend, and gave a sharp, flat clarity to forms. It was suited for control—but not atmosphere.
Watercolor used gum arabic. It was more subtle, transparent, reactive to the paper. It breathed with moisture but lacked permanence and depth.
Oil paint—the revolution—offered something more.
With oil, pigment was suspended in linseed oil, walnut oil, poppy oil, sometimes mixed with resins like mastic or amber. Oil dried slower than tempera, allowing artists to layer, blend, glaze, and manipulate surface in a way never seen before. It allowed for translucency and opacity, softness and intensity. It mimicked the behavior of light itself. Oil didn’t just record form. It transfigured it.
Jan van Eyck: Alchemist with a Brush
Jan van Eyck didn’t invent oil paint, but he transformed it. He was the archetype of the artistic alchemist—a technician obsessed with material perfection. He experimented constantly with ratios of oils, varnishes, and solvents, testing how they dried, how they reflected light, how they preserved color.
In The Arnolfini Portrait, you can see his mastery: the luminous skin, the mirror’s convex reflection, the velvet, the fur, the glass—all rendered with a level of precision that was not just artistic, but chemical. It is a surface transmuted, not painted.
Van Eyck’s studio was not unlike an alchemical laboratory: filled with boiling varnishes, drying panels, pigments being ground to dust and stirred into strange elixirs. He wasn’t just making paintings—he was engineering them. Like the alchemists, he sought the eternal from the ephemeral. He wanted paint to do what gold did in alchemical theory: resist corruption. Conquer death.
II. Devotion at the Edge: Poisons, Madness, and the Beautiful Disgust
But how close to death did ancient alchemists and artists bring themselves—sometimes without even realizing?
The Alchemist’s Risk
For the alchemist, the pursuit of the Philosopher’s Stone was not a hobby. It was a dangerous, soul-consuming quest. In their laboratories—sealed away from the world—they exposed themselves to deadly metals like mercury, arsenic, lead, antimony. Their crucibles exploded. Their alembics shattered. Reactions overheated, vessels cracked, toxic vapors hissed into their lungs.
But beyond the physical dangers, there was the psychological edge: many alchemists lost touch with reality, obsessing over impossible formulas, deciphering mystical codes in silence until their minds unraveled. Some were imprisoned, tortured, or executed for their heretical studies. In Christian Europe, alchemy straddled a dangerous line—caught between divine philosophy and forbidden occultism. Entire libraries of Hermetic texts were banned or burned.
Figures like Michael Sendivogius, who risked his life to write about “celestial salts,” or George Starkey, who inhaled mercury while pursuing spiritual transmutation in New England, remind us: these were not cautious men. Alchemy required faith beyond reason. It demanded sacrifice of the body and the mind.
And painters—unknowing or not—followed the same suicidal devotion.
The Artist’s Poison
Pigments were beautiful. Pigments were deadly.
Ancient and Renaissance artists handled colors that would kill slowly and invisibly:
White lead: a favorite for luminosity. Absorbed through the skin. Caused seizures, organ failure, madness.
Vermilion (mercuric sulfide): luscious, powerful red. Highly toxic when ground.
Orpiment (arsenic trisulfide): a rich golden yellow. It would off-gas arsenic fumes if disturbed.
Emerald green (copper acetoarsenite): beautiful on canvas, murderous on the brush.
Realgar (arsenic again): glowing red-orange, favored by alchemists and artists alike—and feared even by poisoners.
Smalt, Cinnabar, Minium, Naples Yellow: all toxic, all glorious.
These artists painted surrounded by vapor, dust, decay. Many mixed their own pigments by hand. They inhaled powdered metals. They touched them daily with ungloved fingers. Studios were small furnaces of invisible danger.
Even worse were the mediums and solvents—especially later, with turpentine and mineral spirits. But even early artists used linseed oil that could go rancid and resins that released noxious fumes. They worked long hours, often in dim, enclosed spaces. Some likely developed tremors, hallucinations, mood disorders. There is even speculation that the haunting intensity in certain works—like those of Francisco Goya—may reflect neurological or psychological deterioration from chronic lead poisoning.
And yet… they kept painting.
Some Historical Recipes of Death
Here are a few examples of historical painting recipes that carried real danger:
Venetian Red: Made from calcined iron oxide and sometimes stabilized with animal glue and vinegar fumes.
Naples Yellow: A lead antimonate. Highly toxic. Mixed with mastic resin for brilliant lightfastness.
Carmine Lake: Made by boiling crushed cochineal insects in ammonia and alum—often stabilized with urine.
Bone Black: Charred animal bones, sometimes mixed with bitumen or waxes.
Indian Yellow: A luminous golden yellow—originally made by collecting the urine of cows fed exclusively on mango leaves.
Tyrian Purple: Extracted from the mucus of sea snails—it took thousands to produce a few grams of pigment.
Sepia: Extracted from cuttlefish ink sacs.
And where did they store the paint? In animal bladders. Pigments were ground and mixed with oil, then stuffed into dried pig or cow bladders, tied at the ends. To use them, the painter would stab the bladder with a knife or puncture it with a pin, squeezing the color out like bleeding a living organ.
There’s something deeply alchemical, even darkly comedic, in all of this: We take bone, blood, piss, venom—and build angels. We paint saints with poison. We depict Madonnas using liquified corpses and snails. We make light out of filth. We take the Nigredo—the black phase of rot, death, animal matter—and transmute it into Rubedo, the red-gold climax of spiritual perfection.
It’s funny. And it’s holy.
The artist, like the alchemist, walks that same revolting, luminous path: Through the grotesque, toward the divine.
III. “And God said, ‘Let there be light.’” (Genesis 1:3)
And what is the divine? Light.
1. Light Through Oil Paint: Translucency as Alchemical Revelation
Once oil painting emerged, artists gained a new mastery over light itself.
Through layers of transparent glazes, they created surfaces that—unlike tempera or fresco—allowed light to pass through, refract, scatter, reflect, and return to the observer’s eye in luminous depth. This effect—like stained-glass windows or cathedral light—transformed paint into spiritual fire.
Jan van Eyck stands at the apex of this alchemical process. His canvases were built up slowly: a base layer, then fifteen or twenty coatings of thin oil glaze, each colored subtly. Each layer bent and filtered light, creating flesh that glows from within, textures that breathe, reflections that seem to pulse with life. It was a revolution: oil medium as instrument - a way of resisting corruption, conquering death in luminous matter.
Here lies the first lesson: alchemists and artists alike sought to harness light, to manipulate it through
substance—whether through a crucible or a glaze. In alchemy, light was both instrument and sign of transformation. In oil painting, light is substance itself, made visible.
I use these glazing techniques in my own
paintings for that very reason. I’ll be recording a close-up video soon to show how light passes through each wash—glimmering, alive. For now, I’ve included some close-ups of my paintings.
2. Pigments as Light-Controlled Matter
But glaze alone is not enough—the pigments themselves are alchemical instruments of light, physics, and psychology.
In everyday life, we crave or reject colors. We choose objects—in our clothes, our homes, our brands—based on hues we gravitate toward. But color doesn’t exist independently: it is light being absorbed, reflected, refracted, and scattered, interpreted by our retina and brain. Different animals see different light, different spectrums—nature speaks through refracted photons (not just items made in this or that color).
Like careful chemists, artists select pigments that will filter and reflect light in precise ways. Malachite reflects green; vermilion red; ultramarine blue; lead white scatters uniformly to brighten. The artist is a physicist with a brush—controlling wavelength absorption, surface sheen, light vibration.
This revelation struck me: painting is not just image-making, but building illusions—sculpting space and mood out of light manipulation. Our eyes are wired for nuance—and painting can use that wiring to evoke intention and emotion. It feels almost miraculous. Almost… divine.
I’ll dive deeper into the technical physics - refraction, diffraction, subsurface scattering, specular vs. diffuse reflection—in a future post. But for now, know this: light is not just observed—it is crafted. And in oil painting, we finally had the medium to control it.
IV. Painting and the Metaphysical: The Inner Magnum Opus
We’ve followed the artist through the mud of toxic pigments and bladder-bound paints, through fire and glaze and glowing oil, to the control of light itself. But what was all of this really for?
It wasn’t just for beauty. It was transformation.
Just as alchemists sought to transmute base metals into gold, artists seek to transmute raw emotion, pigment, and flesh into vision—into something eternal. What unites both paths is that neither was ever only about external matter. The real gold was inner. The real transformation was of the soul.
Alchemist and Artist: Metaphysical Twins
Historically, the alchemist’s laboratory and the artist’s studio mirrored one another: cluttered sanctums of mystery, where substances were altered, filtered, refined, burned, and layered. Both operated in secrecy. Both suffered for their devotion. Both handled matter to pierce into meaning.
But more profoundly: both were mythic roles. The alchemist was not just a chemist—he was a priest of the material world, working to reveal the hidden light within it. The artist, likewise, is not just an image-maker—they are a vessel for symbols, a transformer of experience, a midwife of visions.
Jung: The Alchemy of the Psyche
Carl Jung understood this deeply. In his monumental psychological work, Jung showed that alchemy wasn’t just an archaic science—it was a symbolic map of the human psyche. He saw in the alchemist’s processes—nigredo (blackness, decay), albedo (whitening, purification), rubedo (reddening, completion)—a mirror of the journey toward individuation: the process of becoming whole.
Nigredo: The confrontation with the shadow, suffering, disintegration—just like the chaos of raw thoughts or a blank canvas.
Albedo: Purification, structure, beginning to understand form and essence—like drawing the first coherent symbols.
Rubedo: Illumination, integration of opposites—the final artwork, or the Philosopher’s Stone within.
For Jung, both artist and alchemist performed symbolic work that moved the unconscious toward consciousness. Their labor was sacred because it dealt with the invisible—the hidden truths of the psyche, the divine mystery beneath the visible world.
He wrote:
“The alchemical operations were real, only not in the physical sense. They were real as psychic processes. The alchemist projected the unconscious psyche into the substance.”— Carl Jung, Psychology and Alchemy
This is painting. Each pigment, each stroke, each glaze is psychic work made visible.
In addition to this, paintings, as we see them in museums today, are not what they once were. Time itself becomes a transformer. Colors fade, surfaces crack, layers yellow, varnishes darken. The materials are alive: they breathe, they react, they decay. And sometimes, man intervenes—restoring, reframing, censoring, or "correcting" what was once a raw burst of vision. The sensitive skin of pigment, laid down by a hand centuries ago, is constantly changing. Every artwork is a chemical event suspended in time, a reaction that never truly ends. Like an alchemist’s experiment left exposed to the air, the painting continues to evolve long after the artist has vanished. Just like the artist, the painting never stops becoming. It continues its own slow individuation—not through will, but through reaction. The artist begins the Work, but the Work continues without them.
Closing the Circle
So the artist, like the alchemist, walks the edge—between science and poetry, vision and madness, body and spirit. They both mine the grotesque to find the gold. They suffer toxicity, obsession, and
secrecy in pursuit of the eternal.
Both are creators of the Magnum Opus.
And that’s why painting isn’t just visual—it’s procedural. It’s a chemical and psychological process. A controlled experiment in transformation. Every layer is a reaction. Every choice of pigment, medium, and surface sets off a chain of events—some immediate, some unfolding over centuries. A painting becomes a sealed vessel for life, death, light, memory, and mutation. A record of matter and mind fused into one material body.
The artist does not merely depict the world. The artist transfigures it. And in doing so—transfigures themselves.
Comments