I'm both amazed and a little saddened. Making Vermeer basically into a Xerox machine freaks me out a bit.
Realizing his depiction of light wasn't his inherent talent, but mechanical saddens me. We all knew he used a camera obscura, but using the small mirror to determine the hue and tone of the paint so exactly... no interpretation. Really confused about this. However he is still a genius, just in a different way.
Brilliant doc.
I think you should try to be less sad. I haven't seen the documentary but I heard about it, and would like to.
I watched some of that other documentary, Vermeer: Master of Light (it's on youtube) and I watched it with idea that he may have been doing this, and it was funny to think about how the leg of the easel in that one painting is reminiscent of a common Photoshop error. Where sometimes, you forget a leg in a hidden layer.
They mention how Vermeer does place things very carefully and even chooses which shadows to omit. Perhaps, sometimes missing shadows of a foreground figure is similar to how Photoshopping a person onto a background leads to a missing shadow, but perhaps it was thoughtful as well. Maybe he made composite images, but he did it with composition in mind.
And thinking of Vermeer as basically a Xerox machine somewhat discounts the artistry and skill of, photographers or directors of photography or cinematographers. The people who, in cinema, decide how to light a scene and which lenses to use and how to frame it and the depth of field. I watched Side by Side, and they take their craft quite seriously.
There's an art to those things. Even people at Pixar or those sorts of studios have to think about how every object in a scene relates to each other, and then how the light and the shadow enhance things. And why some object should be here, and why this character should stand here and not there. It's amazing. I want to see this documentary. He used the tools he had the same way some graphics artists use "Photoshop" and other programs to create worlds.
He may have composited several pictures together, and you can't do that without thought or else it looks wrong. In that other documentary, they note how in the room Tim is trying to recreate, Vermeer actually did play with the postures of the people in it. And the angle of the mirror does not support the reflection, and in fact the reflection itself shows the previous position of the woman. How the location and color of the pitcher was integral, how he removed some shadows and emphasized others as needed.
People who were experts on Vermeer didn't just marvel at the realism of the paintings, they marveled at the composition, the placement of that pitcher, the thoughtfulness of where he put things and the way everything led the eye.
If anything, it adds to Vermeer's genius. He's not only a talented painter, he's basically using the same skill set modern photographers and cinematographers and graphics artists use. It's amazing. And he did it all with less advanced machines.
Even if anyone could do this, not everyone would be able to capture a moment quite as well as someone who's got some mastery of their art. It'd be like comparing a photo of someone taken by someone on facebook who happened to have a DSLR and auto settings and, say, that photograph of the Afghan Girl by Steve McCurry or, some other better example of a famous photographer.
But yeah, it could change art. But it certainly shouldn't diminish it.
Perhaps his depiction of light was mechanical, but his manipulation of light and shadow probably was a sort of inherent talent. An inkjet printer can reproduce an image mechanically, but it did not create the image. Someone had to decide what the image looked like. In this case, Vermeer was both the creator of the image file, and the printer that printed it out.
Beautifully written down.
From a graphic designer, I'd like to thank you.
"A movie screen is larger than life - and we need larger than life stories to fill it." - W. Martell
Brilliant analysis, thank you.
Can't wait to see this documentary.
I have studied art for many years. I saw the documentary yesterday and your understanding of the art of composition was exactly what I came out of it with. Whether an artist is trying for realism or abstraction, he or she accomplishes nothing of interest if the underlying composition is not good. I do think however that the analysis of the inability of people to see gradations of color on a wall lit from one side is wrong. I can do it easily.
shareThe neurological argument could have been made clearer. You can see gradations of color, but if you tried to reproduce it in a painting, it wouldn't match, because what you're seeing is a simplified version of the reality.
You can't foveate (center an image on the retina) the entire wall at once. You get a certain sense of the light on the spot you are foveating, and a sense of how the rest of the wall differs. Now when you move to the next spot, where the light is X less intense, what you perceive is not necessarily X less; it will be brighter. In fact, when you look at the part of the wall where the light is least bright, it will be a lot brighter subjectively, relative to its absolute difference from where the light is brightest. You wouldn't want a vision system that didn't do this, for obvious reasons!
The point is that the brain preserves the idea of gradations of light intensity, but the intensities you see, as you move your eyes across the wall, are designed so that you see as much as possible of the spot you are looking at, while maintaining the sense of the overall gradation. But the scaling of intensities is not at all realistic.
Prepare your minds for a new scale of physical, scientific values, gentlemen.share
Yeah, scientific *beep* directly from the mind of Penn. Although technically correct, it has nothing to do with painting or art. Sure, will an artist's gradation PRECISELY represent the lighting on a surface? No, they're not a camera. But they CAN easily render something very similar to what is seen. The fact that it's not atomically precise is meaningless.
shareI have studied art for many years. I saw the documentary yesterday and your understanding of the art of composition was exactly what I came out of it with. Whether an artist is trying for realism or abstraction, he or she accomplishes nothing of interest if the underlying composition is not good. I do think however that the analysis of the inability of people to see gradations of color on a wall lit from one side is wrong. I can do it easily.
shareI love this whole thread.
No, I don't think it will change art. Painters aren't that interested in verisimilitude anymore, and haven't been for over a century. People who are take photographs.
There is another point, verbaleruption. This whole movie reminds me of nothing so much as the legendary Kontiki expedition of 1947, which my namesake Thor Heyerdahl mounted to prove that Polynesia was settled by people from South America. The similarities are striking. Like Tim Jenison, Heyerdahl wanted to prove a historical hypothesis by demonstrating that what he proposed was physically possible using contemporary technology. Like Jenison, he went to elaborate lengths to reverse engineer his raft from old drawings of Inca rafts, and did a lot of it with his own hands, felling the balsa trees himself in the jungles of Ecuador, floating the logs down to the sea, and designing and constructing the raft with meticulous attention to historical detail. Like Tim's Vermeer, the Kontiki expedition was a triumphant success, and Heyerdahl went to his grave believing that he had proved his theory. But the thing is, he was wrong. Today, overwhelming biometric data indicate that the Polynesians came from Southeast Asia, not South America.
Don't understand me wrong. Tim's Vermeer is a magnificent accomplishment, and "Tim's Vermeer" is easily the most interesting movie I have seen in a long time. I'm just saying.
Nice comparison. I'm *beep* amazed at some of the simpletons here who see ONE example of a POSSIBLE optical system to assist in artwork, and suddenly it's the "VERMEER 2000 ART-O-MATIC".
Objective thinking people, try to observe what people are saying, not what you THINK they are saying.
What ever technology that was used by artists in 17th century Holland pales in relevance to the effect that photography has had on painting, and that effect is over a century old. This documentary was fascinating, but it doesn't diminish Vermeer a bit, just casts a bit more light on him, and it certainly won't change art.
share? Photography has had a positive effect in allowing for easier creation of reference materials for artists, but it certainly has had zero effect on any of the output. Painting is still painting, and photography is photography.
shareI would argue that photography has not only made a very visible change in the way artists draw, but in the way people in general see. Those of us who've grown up looking at photographs and slow-motion photography have developed visual understandings of the world that 18th-Century people lacked. Even when a 21-Century American artist draws a figure from life, their manner of transferring it to 2 dimensions is affected by their having looked at hundreds of thousands of photographs over their lifetime. Their understanding of 2-dimensional representations of reality are fundamentally different. Contrast the slightly distorted, exaggerated figures of Rembrandt with the staid, more accurate but less poetic figures of Hopper, and the ultimate example of this change, Chuck Close. No one draws figures today the way Rembrandt and Dürer did. I attribute this to the modern ubiquity of photography. Thomas Eakins was one of the first figurative painters to start using photography extensively, and you can watch the level of poetic distortion fade from his work over his career.
shareWow! That is not a conclusion to be drawn from this movie. Even Tim, Penn, the artist consultants, et al never came to that conclusion. Holy cripes, critical thinking much Batman?
Tim's work was not Vermeer quality, nor does any "mechanical help" whether Tim's method or something else diminish Vermeer's talent.
In fact, Vermeer's painting has a TON of light effects that neither Tim's device nor Tim's painting portray.
Making Vermeer basically into a Xerox machine freaks me out a bit.