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I got zero, yuss! Perfect in yet another area of life!
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The point in the movie where I was convinced was when Tim said that the original painting was bluer than he expectedâŚdaylight colour temperature, anyone?
Not to underestimate the work done, but it seems that he is showing off his equipment. Or perhaps I am just jealous 
On another thought having worked with an analogue lathe I think it is pretty capable of producing this leg shape without any help from CNC. Unless of course it wasnât in working shape to begin with.
Thatâs strange. I got a 0 on it, and I felt like I was kind of guessing on a lot of these, and I donât consider myself particularly good with colors.
Guess I missed my calling as an Old Master when I just decided to become an Old One.
Awesome, use it or lose it! I went to the eye doc recently and she discovered a scratch on my cornea. I was surprised.
She said, âYou donât remember it? Itâs a big enough scratch that you would remember it. Your eye would have hurt a LOT when the injury happened.â
âNope.â
I have no idea how it happened.
???
You get points for perfection. I get a few for obliviousness.
I scored a 3.
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I absolutely love when someone has a passion for something like this and goes all out to realize his or her âproject.â Itâs inspiring.
I absolutely hate how people can find reason to criticize something like this. All this nitpicking by Internet experts⌠Itâs deflating.
Jeezeâwhat did YOU do over YOUR summer vacation?
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Tim needs to stop calling them â350 year old color photographsâ. Even if his theory is correct, Vermeerâs paintings are not âphotographsâ by any stretch of the imagination.
True. OTOH if Vermeer were to pull one of those framed paintings off the wall and there remained a non-faded rectangle on the wall where the sun never reached â THAT would be a photograph.
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Painters do it all the time. The âsecretâ is to develop the painting from simple to complex all over its surface, rather than concentrating on one small area and finding it looks wrong when placed into the context of new surrounding colors.
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Yep, as I explained. That optical illusion takes advantage of âcolor constancyâ. Unless we make an effort to see what colors actually form the various parts of a white wall, in glancing we (humans) read a white wall as generally white. Also, we read all walls in a room faced by different light as being painted the same color - even though they reflect light different ways.
Artists look beyond that. We donât just look at the âwhite wallâ, we look for the variation in tonal quality. We also have various tricks and tools to help us do so. Naturally good color vision and training to see color separation are two things we use. I liked @tgarretteaton 's comment because he mentioned the grey card trick that painters sometimes use to do color matches. Grey bars are also sometimes placed across illusions to âbreakâ them. Hereâs a link to the MIT page that does just that for the shaded checkerboard.
http://web.mit.edu/persci/people/adelson/checkershadow_proof.html
My theory is a big spider walked across your face while you were sleeping, lifted your eyelid up with one of its legs, and bit you on the eyeball. You should sleep in a beekeepers suit from now on.
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Isnât this a lot like using modern tools to build a pyramid and offering it as proof of the Egyptians having done the same? Assuming no device like the one Tim Jenison used has been found amongst Vermeerâs possessions, all we have is speculation coupled with the old âEgyptians couldnât have done that without modern technologyâ style of supposition.
While the theory is not implausible, I ultimately feel it underestimates peopleâs ability to accomplish a great deal without the use of âmodernâ tools.
The eye cannot be trusted to choose the proper colors by plain sight, but remember an artist has his painting to compare against the subject being painted. Load that optical illusion into a paint program and replace the color for B with the color of the tile to the left of A and the mismatch will jump right out at you. The artist will ultimately end up choosing the right colors because only the right colors will match the subject being painted.
When I was five, my parents took me to have my portrait painted at Sears. The method used was very much what you have used. In fact, the color stripes on the shirt I wore were upside down in order. This technique has continued to be used for portrait painting.
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Thatâs where @tgarretteaton 's frustration came from. Basically, the perceived idea that people are treating great skill like a magic trick that needs to be âseen behindâ. The truth is that in the video Tim says, âIâm not a painter,â but thatâs actually a bit of a magic trick being pulled on us - a misdirection.
Look at all the other work he did do. He may never have trained as a painter, but clearly he is a draftsman, planner, woodworker, metalworker, and various other things. He may not have painted before this, but his hands are trained to follow intricate instruction for drawing and construction. All that would contribute to him having advanced ability - without other specific training. A person with no training probably couldnât do what he did. Their hands wouldnât obey the instruction. (Heâd also have to score well on that test I posted to use the device he suggests was used.)
So he may have found the correct set of tools that a truly skilled artist used to create a fine piece of art - or he may not. Either way, in the topic presented here, he did need to acknowledge the needed skill to produce a masterpiece using such a device. It was an omission.
Hereâs a video that shows the original photo painting process, and shows that Tim was most likely talking about images produced via âcamera obscuraâ when talking about âphotographsâ. So, that may excuse the confusion there.
I found another video, and this one may settle the argument for all. At the end of this one, Tim makes quite clear that he feels positively about the use of the machine by Vermeer. âI donât think this detracts anything from Vermeer. In my mind it makes Vermeer, you know, more of a genius.â
A very impressive exercise, and a fun read. But what I donât read here is whether he started by consulting some Vermeer historians to see what the consensus is for his painting methods. I have seen quite a bit of what might be called âphotorealisticâ painting from different artists and periods, some quite a bit earlier than âpearl earringâ. I would think that any investigation would begin with asking exactly what we already know about Vermeer and his techniques. And there has been a ton of scholarship on the subject. Vermeer left us a self portrait of himself painting in that room. We also have some very detailed household inventories, which I do not think reveal any sort of optical equipment. Not that any of this takes away from the coolness of the project. I enjoy his attention to detail in attempting to recreate Vermeerâs studio. I am just not ready to agree with his conclusions until I know more. The line " I donât know how to paintâŚ" throws up some red flags for me. I would think that would be a starting point. To me it is kind like " I am not a pilot, and I have not talked to any aeronautical engineers, but having looked at an airplane, here are the experiments I have conducted to determine how aircraft work". he could certainly be right, but when solving perceived historical mysteries, It would seem wise to me to start by accumulating all known knowledge on the subject. On the other hand, I now want a Vermeer room in my house.
Using an optical device to make painting by hand more accurate is hardly the same as taking a photograph.
I agree, itâs still incorrect. With the videos, I was showing why he might have been using the term at all. If you havenât, I recommend you watch the video of him painting his fatherâs photo in greys. When heâs talking about âVermeerâs cameraâ and âVermeerâs lensâ, heâs trying to use common terms to explain how the more uncommon device (the 45-degree mirror) relates to a common object (a modern camera). He talks about the âpaintingâ process, not âmaking a photoâ. He knows heâs painting.
In the paragraph here he mentions the process as a type of photography, âachieved not with film and chemicals, but with the human hand.â He discusses the projected image. The problem is that true photography does require a light receptive surface that captures the image - not the intervention of a human hand. What heâs doing is a blend of hand painting and using mirrors and lenses to assist his skill. Itâs a hybrid, a different activity, but still painting. The big problem? The words âphotographâ and âphotographyâ should always have appeared in quotes - because the use of optics does change the painting process, skills used, and the ability to replicate exactly.
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