The words “texture” and “facture” are significant terms to painters (maybe in ways that they had not considered or even perhaps that they are not aware of).
Texture is a catch all term for the surface of a painting. To be more specific, texture is the perception of surface. How the reality manifests itself to our sight. Facture is the actual surface. How it feels to the touch. Think of the word “manufacture”. It comes from the Latin “manus” meaning hand and “factus” which is the past participle of the word “facere”, which means to make: made by hand (though that’s less a definition in today’s world of manufacture; robofacture maybe. Robotum being a derivation of the Greek automaton, which refers to mechanical devices)
Our perception of surface is indeed more mechanically derived than ever before, as screens have become - whether one likes it or not- an integral feature, a dominant interface for some, of our thoughts and interactions with the wider world. What is the consequence of this to the way paintings are made and experienced? Take a social media post of an artwork for example. The artist posts a recent work, it’s viewed by significantly more people than will ever see that work in the flesh and then a percentage of that audience will acknowledge it through a like and perhaps a supporting comment - invariably positive and congratulatory. What has just been seen? The work? Clearly not, that sits on a wall in a room, studio or a gallery. It’s the virtual image of the work - a screen facsimile.
When we look at screens we cannot experience the painting’s facture, only its texture, and the degree of felt perception will be related to the resolution of the screen image. We can zoom in to remarkable levels and feel that we are seeing the minutest details, yet the reality is we are focusing on the even surface of the screen, whereas the actual surface is not even, it’s uneven.
Think of the experience of looking at painting on two levels: the macro and the micro. The macro would include the texture of the work, its perceived reality. Within this level, language dominates as a descriptor. The evenness of the screen relegates the work to an image. In the world of images, language is king. The perceptual experience can be explained readily and, as such, can be controlled, choreographed and - mass - communicated. We live mainly in the macro world of experiences when looking at paintings - screen versions, virtual realities (is that really a tautology?). In the macro world it is easy to see how figurative painting will dominate, it’s a representation of ourselves and is easily understood. For abstract painting to connect a degree of contextual understanding is needed. Enough actual works have been seen to get the gist of the painting and how it probably looks in its actual flesh reality. Therefore certain tropes of handling will lend themselves to a sense of reassurance of such a priori realities. Quite often I have seen a work online which looked pretty good, only to see it in the flesh and be disappointed. The screen flatters to deceive.
The micro level experience is what we truly experience when looking at the work in the flesh. This experience is a light-speed one. We move it to the macro as a way of controlling it, processing and explaining it. Better eyes on a work will inherently understand this and seek to keep the discussions about what the work is actually doing rather than moving the discussion to the implied.
This is a moot point and a bit of rabbit hole, but the overwhelming discourse on art resides in the macro. Intelligent writers or commentators on art still miss this and fuel their egos (however gently) discussing only the implied: the narrative, the symbolism, and indeed the context (as I said previously, the context is the repository of experience that the art “likers” access when looking on screen - present them with something out of that scope and a scrambling indifference can set in)
As a caveat and to sharpen or seek to clarify the implications for the separation of these two terms, facture and texture, further, consider the nature of a carbon filtration system in a water filter jug. The active carbon although small in size has an exponentially larger surface area. A postage stamp sized section of this carbon filter has a surface area equivalent to that of a football field. Think about the micro experience of seeing in these terms: our brain experiences a massive surface area in a small section of painted surface. I am not advocating that painters work in micro detail, rather the more tuned and sensitive the handling of the surface, the richer the experience will be. Colour will determine these decisions, ultimately, as its the experience of sight in the electromagnetic spectrum (less than 1% of said spectrum but my favourite part!). Colour in painting needs some sort of form to hold it. If paint is used, then how this material is handled, how it meets the support, how its actual surface presents itself is the truth of its reality. Everything else will be subsidiary. Art is often thought of as a visual “language” because the experience is perceived in the macro, yet its truth lies in the micro (no pun intended).
When making art, also, the macro will dominate. If working from a motif of any kind, we name it first as a conceptual understanding, then draw to that understanding. Most art teaching is often directed at getting the student to look closely and find ways of responding. This can morph into a this is how you respond approach - so prevalent online. In fact if you think about it, right from the very earliest daubings in paint or crayon a tiny tot will receive lots of praise, then the line “What is it?” Immediately moving the physical to the conceptual.
It would be good to see a return to the discourse around the verb of art-making rather than the noun. To look and talk about the way the work has been made, the time frame, even, of its making, the way the artist discovered, revised and manipulated the realities of the paint to reveal the colour. Rather we are going around in circles parading a never-ending set of nouns - the art as screen image, liked and congratulated, seldom discussed (which would break the niceties of the bubble reality). AI is now speedily churning out these nouns from optimised prompt inputs - either words or more screen images. Is this really moving Art on? Is it being a Luddite to complain about this? “It’s the same as the camera’s impact etc” being the riposte; that would need a lot of investigative thought as an analogy, though, I feel. People still attend exhibitions and in record numbers at times. But the art that is presented is designed to sit in this macro level. This is the art that gets the headlines, the column inches, the financial support and the promotion. The more unreal the work, the more real the rewards it would seem.
Yet this seems to be all we’ve got at present. Do we have to just post, get some likes and carry on?