Something interesting happened to art in the 1600s, it started to look a lot more like reality than it ever had before. The work of Johannes Vermeer has an especially realistic quality. About the time Vermeer was working artists were using mirrors and lenses and various secret tracing methods. A number of paintings from this period have photographic details, such as lens aberrations and depth of focus errors.
Tim Jenison, a gazillionaire with way too much time on his hands, decides to play around and see if he can figure out how Vermeer painted his paintings. He decides it was done with mirrors.
He sets up a simple studio with a lens and two mirrors. Tools that would have been available in Vermeer’s time. But then he decides that he wants to make his own Vermeer painting. So he recreates the entire set from The Music Lesson. He makes everything himself and spends years doing it. Then he uses his cool little mirror trick to recreate the painting, one tiny brush stroke at a time. This takes a couple of more years.
Several years ago I found a drawing tool that was a smoky piece of plastic set at a 45 degree angle. You looked down through the plastic and traced whatever you wanted to draw. I’m pretty sure I had it years ago, well, before Tim made his amazing discovery. I wasn’t able to bang out Vermeer like art with this tool btw.
Tim, however, does manage to make a very Vermeer like painting with his much nicer mirror setup. He insists at every turn that he isn’t an artist, so he shouldn’t have been able to make a painting like this. But it’s pretty clear watching the movie that Tim is a damned good artist. His painting doesn’t look like a Paint By Numbers Vermeer, it looks like a painted by Vermeer Vermeer.
Tim’s Vermeer is a film by Penn & Teller. Penn makes a few appearances and is suitably impressed with Tim’s efforts to do everything the real Vermeer might have done, right down to mixing his own colors and making his own paints. It’s a cool story and I think Vermeer likely used mirrors in the making of his art.
I’m not entirely convinced that anyone with a paintbrush could bang out their own Vermeer. But it was very interesting watching Tim grind out his.
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