My sister snapped this picture the other day: one of her boys got off the school bus with his nose buried in a book. He made it into the driveway, but then spent twenty minutes leaning on their car, reading.
On Saturday night I watched the 2013 documentary Tim's Vermeer. It is a film which follows the efforts of a man- Tim Jenison- to reproduce one of the most famous works of Johannes Vermeer, the seventeenth century Dutch painter. Tim Jenison is the founder of a computer company called NewTek. In his spare time, Jenison tinkers with various inventions he's come up with and indulges in an eclectic array of hobbies. One of these is art, specifically the artwork of Vermeer. Johannes Vermeer (1632-1675) was a Dutch painter who was renowned for the almost photo-like quality of his work, particularly his amazing ability to paint light. This can be seen in all of his paintings, including two of his most famous ones- The Girl With A Pearl Earring, and The Geographer: What seems to have caught Tim Jenison's interest is a 2001 book written by an architect named Philip Steadman called Vermeer's Camera. In it, Steadman argues that Vermeer used a camera obscura to produce images to trace for his paintings. This was not a new idea: the controversial theory has been kicked around for over a hundred years. The difference is that Steadman built an accurate reconstruction of Vermeer's studio and also a camera obscura which, while not proving the artist used this method, proved that he could have done so. Jenison reads this book and becomes obsessed with proving to himself that Vermeer could have actually painted pictures in this manner. Documented on film by his friend, Penn Jillette, he begins an investigative journey which will span several years. His first effort involves setting up a mirror at a 45 degree angle and using it to paint a portrait of his father from an inverted photograph of him. The experiment is successful: Jenison next determines to try to reproduce Vermeer's The Music Lesson by using a camera obscura. To do this, he builds an exact replica of Vermeer's studio to scale. Inside the studio, he builds a dark room which will be the camera obscura. It turns out that there is enough room to build one of the size needed to sit in and see the reflected image of the room. Tim then decorates the room to look exactly like The Music Lesson and gets to work on his painting. It takes a long time, naturally, and he refines his method as he goes along. For example, he finds that using a concave mirror- which were used in telescopes in Vermeer's time- is more effective and switches to one. He also travels to Britain to consult with Philip Steadman, the author of Vermeer's Camera and gets to see the real painting while he's there. In the end, Tim Jenison's efforts result in a very respectable reproduction of The Music Lesson and this seems further evidence that Vermeer could have- and perhaps probably did- use a method similar to this when he was painting. Ultimately, it is left to the viewer to decide if they think Vermeer used a camera obscura, and what, if anything, this says about his artwork if he did.
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About MeI'm a lover of good books, classic movies, and well-written shows (as well as some pretty cheesy ones, to be completely honest). Categories
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