Slashdot Mirror
Reverse Engineering the Technical and Artistic Genius of Painter Jan Vermeer
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "Kurt Anderson has an interesting read at Vanity Fair about Dutch painter Jan Vermeer, best known for 'Girl with a Pearl Earring,' and the search for how he was able to achieve his photo-realistic effects in the 1600s. Considered almost as mysterious and unfathomable as Shakespeare in literature, Vermeer at age 21, with no recorded training as an apprentice, began painting masterful, singular, uncannily realistic pictures of light-filled rooms and ethereal young women. 'Despite occasional speculation over the years that an optical device somehow enabled Vermeer to paint his pictures, the art-history establishment has remained adamant in its romantic conviction: maybe he was inspired somehow by lens-projected images, but his only exceptional tool for making art was his astounding eye, his otherworldly genius,' says Anderson. To try to learn how Vermeer was able to achieve such highly realistic painting, American inventor and millionaire Tim Jenison spent five years learning how to make lenses himself using 17th-century techniques, mixed and painted only with pigments available in the late 1600s and even constructed a life-size reproduction of Vermeer's room with wooden beams, checkerboard floor, and plastered walls. The result has been a documentary movie, Tim's Vermeer, by magicians Penn & Teller that may have resolved the riddle and explains why it has remained a secret for so long. 'The photorealistic painters of our time, none of them share their techniques,' says Teller. 'The Spiderman people aren't talking to the Avatar people. When [David] Copperfield and I have lunch, we aren't giving away absolutely everything.'"
My cheeks are covered with graveyard fog, and you're all jealous of me! Look at them! Look at my milky white cheeks and succumb to your feelings of inadequacy!
That ain't "graveyard fog".
That's a 17th century Bootsy Collins in the making!
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
Personally, I find it comforting to know that this troll is in every Slashdot thread. I feel anxious when I can't find it.
Kurt Andersen. With an "e."
Idiot. It's not "cosmonaut", it's "condiment".
We are not alone, just saying.
"Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.
It's not "thank you for being a friend", it's "fuck you for being a fraud".
and don't pretend to be one, but I don't believe this "discovery" in any way belittles the talent of Vermeer. He was the artistic nerd of his time and his discovery is quite extraordinary - how many people today would think to do that?
I had a chance to hear David Stork present his counter arguments to the 'Secret Knowledge' theory expoused by David Hockney and Charles Falco. He was focusing on Van Dyke, who's work is not as objectively realistic as Vermeer. His two main pieces of evidence were:
1. If you attempt to re-create the perspective in the a Van Dyke painting in the computer, it never quite lines up with spacial reality, even accounting for the distortions of the lenses or mirrors which might have been used to project the or image the scene.
2. If you put a capable artist to the task, they can create a highly realist scene, with better geometric accuracy than the 15-16th century artists using no optical aids whatsoever.
Vermeer is definitely a standout. I don't believe that any of his contemporaries were producing work remotely similar to what he was doing. So I almost believe he might have had something up his sleeve. It is know that he took a really long time to complete a painting. I wonder if he could have used optical techniques out in the open, and it would have been so unusual that others wouldn't have even understood what he was doing, and so not think it worth noting it down.
Check Out the counter-arguments at : http://www.artrenewal.org/articles/2003/Hockney_Refuted/hockney1.php
(Warning: drawings of naked people done without optical aids)
It's a bit like von Daniken's claim that the pyramids were built by aliens: "it looks hard, and I can't work out how they did it, so it must have been some kind of secret thing."
The problem is, it looks hard to people who haven't been trained, have no innate talent, haven't been motivated strongly to do it, and haven't worked at it for a long enough to figure out how to get it done. People who have done those things are able to do it.
After reading the article I still don't quite get how this technique works.
From the article: âoewhen the color is the same, the mirror edge disappears."
Come again? One of the accompanying photos shows Mr. Jenison with a mirror near his eye and a paintbrush in his hand.
But I still don't understand what's happening here.
If you're a zombie and you know it, bite your friend!
Bullshit. Clearly someone knows nothing of the VFX industry and has never heard of SIGGRAPH.
I'm out of my mind right now, but feel free to leave a message.....
Vermeer makes some damned fine heavy equipment - the digging Dutchman!
Just kidding - I know the difference.
And it's pretty cheap. Go here: http://neolucida.com/
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
Because Adobe can release Vermeer Photoshop plugins that make boobs and LOLcats look photorealistic. That's why.
Speculation that Vermeer used a camera obscure goes way back. We also know that he used some very traditional techniques, including sticking a pin in the vanishing point and drawing lines strings radiating from the pin to get the right perspective.
""" ... and discovered â€oean exponential relationship in the light on the white wall.†The brightness of any surface becomes exponentially less bright the farther it is from a light sourceâ€"but the unaided human eye doesnâ€(TM)t register that.
"""
False, and false. The eye compensates for the *inverse square law*, which is different from not registering it. Were it not to be followed, the eye would certainly notice something is wrong. So by accepting the gradation as not worthy of attention, the brain has noticed and approved it.
Also FatPhil on SoylentNews, id 863
I am Appalled at the lack of art knowledge at Slashdot! Certainly camera obscura has been know for centuries but many artists can do as well without it. In second grade, I had a friend with who could copy any picture by hand from memory. He had a game where he would see how long it would take for someone to figure out which picture it was while he drew the lines randomly. He had a photographic memory and the ability to freehand a straight line or circle. . . . Now he's a dentist.
Added to Couchpotato this morning. Just checked; I still don't have it. Sound like bullshit.
Vermeer was a bit of an enigma, even to his contemporaries. Most of the information we have on him is largely speculative but it's very clear Johannes Vermeer did make an impact on the art community of his time.
I guess it's probably more obvious to those of us who were or are unable to change depth of focus.
Don't complain about syntax, grammar, or spelling. There is no.hell like input on android.
This is a ridiculous article.
The whole point of training as an artist is to acquire the art of "seeing" the subject.
To a normal person the action of the eye (focus, colour balance, brightness compensation) is invisible and transparent.
But a trained artist learns to incorporate the effect of the eye's processing into his painting.
Some do it instinctively, some use photographic aids.
Many early artists used a camera obscura and/or mirrors to help them "see" the subject when creating the first draft of a painting.
These days an artist will often use a colour photograph for the same purpose.