Tim's Vermeer
That's the title of an amazing documentary I just saw - it's been at the top of my movie list lately. It's about this inventor/entrepreneur in San Antonio who, around 2009 became obsessed with re-creating a painting by Vermeer - from scratch. He actually did it - a labor that took him around ten months just to execute the brushwork. His object was to re-discover exactly how it is that Johannes Vermeer (17th century Dutch painter, he of "The Girl With the Pearl Earring") actually painted his works …which has long mystified admirers and art historians alike. There's a true-to-life optical accuracy to Vermeer's paintings that seems uncanny, almost photographic.
David Hockney, one of the pre-eminent (English, though for years he worked in LA) artists of the late twentieth century has written on Vermeer postulating the use of a 'camera obscura' (basically a pin-hole box camera) used by the Dutch artist to create his remarkable paintings. Tim Jenison, the main character in this film and incidentally a nice-looking bear, is the first to have actually applied a plausible technique to explain how Vermeer did it. Tim is not an artist himself, but taught himself to handle a paint brush and even to grind and mix his own oil paints. He built his own setup, re-creating the room that most often appears in Vermeer's paintings, and uses only optical technology, i.e. basic lens and mirrors that would have been available in Holland 350 years ago.
The film is produced by Penn & Teller - Teller directs while Penn appears occasionally to comment and do voiceovers. At the end Penn (he's the taller one with the pony-tail) says something like " 'Unfathomable genius' seems to have lost its meaning - this is now 'fathomable genius' ….which I think is pithy and funny and also rather accurate.
A side note the film does not mention. As far as I know, there are only about two dozen genuine Vermeer paintings in existence (maybe less)…. as the film demonstrates, if the artist really did paint this way, the process is profoundly painstaking and requires the patience of Job - which might also explain why there are not more paintings from a major career artist of this period.
I think the movie would be of wide general interest to a lot of us - Tim explains that in Vermeer's time they did not have the sharp division we now have between the arts and sciences & technology - so indeed there was a blur between the art and the 'technology' that was very likely employed by Vermeer to create his masterpieces.
Here's the lURL link for the movie trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=94pCNUu6qFY
David Hockney, one of the pre-eminent (English, though for years he worked in LA) artists of the late twentieth century has written on Vermeer postulating the use of a 'camera obscura' (basically a pin-hole box camera) used by the Dutch artist to create his remarkable paintings. Tim Jenison, the main character in this film and incidentally a nice-looking bear, is the first to have actually applied a plausible technique to explain how Vermeer did it. Tim is not an artist himself, but taught himself to handle a paint brush and even to grind and mix his own oil paints. He built his own setup, re-creating the room that most often appears in Vermeer's paintings, and uses only optical technology, i.e. basic lens and mirrors that would have been available in Holland 350 years ago.
The film is produced by Penn & Teller - Teller directs while Penn appears occasionally to comment and do voiceovers. At the end Penn (he's the taller one with the pony-tail) says something like " 'Unfathomable genius' seems to have lost its meaning - this is now 'fathomable genius' ….which I think is pithy and funny and also rather accurate.
A side note the film does not mention. As far as I know, there are only about two dozen genuine Vermeer paintings in existence (maybe less)…. as the film demonstrates, if the artist really did paint this way, the process is profoundly painstaking and requires the patience of Job - which might also explain why there are not more paintings from a major career artist of this period.
I think the movie would be of wide general interest to a lot of us - Tim explains that in Vermeer's time they did not have the sharp division we now have between the arts and sciences & technology - so indeed there was a blur between the art and the 'technology' that was very likely employed by Vermeer to create his masterpieces.
Here's the lURL link for the movie trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=94pCNUu6qFY