Who is this Tim guy? Oh, it’s THAT Tim. I still have my DigiView but I haven’t thought about the briefly famous Kiki Stockhammer in decades. Thanks for tickling my memory.
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It’s a cello, not a viola.
They aren’t and can’t be photographs since they never had a light sensitive layer that captured an image by the action of light (not a painters brush). There was no photography 350 years ago.
It’s a viola da gamba, otherwise known as a viol, not a cello. It has 6 strings and a fretted fingerboard. The cello has 4 strings and is fretless.
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interesting. i did of course swap some around while working on it but never really repeated swaps once i thought they were in place. as an engineer i’ve never been exposed to the ‘color training’ that i imagine artists must get.
Aha! That makes sense.
Thank you. That’s what I was thinking too. I just wanted to see a clear photo of what the painter sees on the canvas. They show the device but not the image it produces.
Painters across all times have used tools to get things the way they want them. What I actually don’t understand is the contemporary horror over the use of tools as if it amounts to cheating. You use what you need to get done what you need to get done. That’s the rule.
Artists of the past used grids to look through for perspective. I fully imagine some of the people on this thread to deny that crying “but nooo they were just good at it” and that’s just stupid because using a tool doesn’t imply you aren’t good at anything. But if you have a job and a specific vision that the job requires you perfect then you use whatever you think of to make that happen and to make it happen efficiently because that’s where your money comes from.
This particularly true if that essential tool didn’t exist before you and you pretty much invented it.
As for painters being able to paint like this all the time. No. That’s why he was famous, precisely because not many painters could paint like him. If it was so freaking easy everyone would have been doing it.
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Exactly. Even a better brush is a better tool. That’s partly why I posted that other vid I found of Jenison stating, “I don’t think this detracts anything from Vermeer. In my mind it makes Vermeer, you know, more of a genius.”
He clearly is just fascinated by what process might have been used to achieve the goal, (this exercise took him several years to complete) and he isn’t claiming that using any tool made Vermeer less of a master. He just would really like to know how Vermeer did it.
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Now for the other side of things:
It’s entirely plausible that Vermeer used lenses. Better evidence is actually cited in the already linked article above.
There are several problems with the statement that the human eye couldn’t see things the way they appear in the painting. A) Of course it could, or else how would it seem realistic to people and B) if that appeared totally counter to the way that the human eye saw light then photographs wouldn’t look “photographic” to us.
Secondly, this exercise is very interesting but it’s going to be biased specifically because he set up the room to almost exactly imitate the painting and then basically replicated that construction. IOW, he used tools that allow some one to make a very faithful representation of a given scene and made sure that scene very nearly matched the painting, thereby pretty much guaranteeing they would look similar.
Assuming Vermeer used a tool like this he likely would still have changed or edited aspects of the scene, and we would have no way of knowing what or how. So really all this demonstrates is that the technology was available to Vermeer and could have been used as an artist’s tool, and that the technology can be used to make imitations of Vermeer’s work.
I already argued against the statement that, “the human eye couldn’t see things the way they appear in the painting.” That’s why I didn’t do so again. It’s a faulty statement. Jenison misinterpreted “color constancy” (our ability to interpret a color as a color in various lighting) to mean that the human eye could not actually see subtle tonal shading. That’s wholly incorrect. We do see shading, and artists are trained to see what colors make shading happen. Vermeer could (and must) have been able to see subtle color shading to use the device that Jenison himself used.
His argument about Vermeer’s process gains the most weight from noting that grids do not appear under Vermeer’s work. Examined paintings show little variation in construction, which is rare for that period. Even so, they are accurate for perspective drawing techniques. That does suggest an aid of some type to gain accurate perspective measurements, but what type we will never really know.
http://lucian.uchicago.edu/blogs/vrc/2012/07/18/3d-reconstruction-of-vermeer/
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Someone else in this thread referred to ‘Yak Shaving’, and it certainly was. I was expecting him to take a luthier course, build and learn to play the musical instrument in the picture as well.
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L_Mariachi, it is a viola da gamba, which is usually referred to in English as a viol or a gamba. Never a viola. It has 6 strings and frets like a guitar, but is held between the knees and bowed like a cello, only with an underhand grip. It flourished between roughly 1500 and 1700, when it was supplanted by the cello, but there are active enthusiasts even now. I’m one of them, and I play it in all 3 common sizes: treble, tenor and bass. The instrument in the picture is a bass.
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I scored a 4 also. Which I thought was pretty good for a 66-year-old lady – color perception tends to deteriorate with age because of changes and opacities in the lens. And possibly changes in the retina, I don’t know. I wonder if I would have done better 40 years ago!
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You did really well!
The test I provided is called the Farnsworth Munsell 100 Hue Test, and several studies have examined age differences in scoring. Young children tend to score badly, because they rush the test - like I did to post here. I normally score between 2 and 0.
From 20 to 40 is the best scoring age group, with some degradation at older ages, but because of the way the test is designed (testing sensitivity between hues, not brightness or saturation - those are constant) there’s surprisingly little deviation.
That seems to be the main factor. After a quick round of “this should go about here”, a time-consuming comparison of every adjacent pair can yield a perfect result, I think, even if one’s color perception isn’t so hot. A dog, in contrast, would have trouble on both accounts.
Sorry Andy, but people with true color vision issues just can’t score a perfect score on the test. In that sense, it’s similar to the Ishihara color blindness test.
http://wwwdelivery.superstock.com/WI/223/4269/PreviewComp/SuperStock_4269-30063.jpg
Well, “not so hot” to me isn’t quite so poor that it would fail the Ishihara. My point is that above a certain threshold of physical capacity, the approach to the test makes more difference in the ultimate score. The pair comparisons in the tile sorting test would be trivial for a mantis shrimp, for example, but within a fairly normal range of human perception it’s the method and time taken that makes more of a difference.
For me, when I was bubbling through with the intention of getting a zero, I found it quite difficult, except that I noticed that there was a kind of perceptual illusion when I was doing pair comparisons. The color inside the tile meant to match the right side tended to coagulate to the right side, top, and bottom border of the tiles, while the color inside the tile meant to match the left side seemed to appear as a blob intruding into the tile from the left. It wasn’t that way in actuality, but when I stopped trying to think about it rationally, that’s how the pair comparisons worked. The tile with the bigger blob of left-side color went left, the border with more right-side envelopment went right.
Perhaps for me there’s a little bit of color/spatial synesthesia happening.
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The Farnsworth Munsell 100 Hue Test really does do just a color comparison, even though it may not seem to do so if you have color vision. That’s because you can see the colors. It omits variation of saturation and brightness from testing. Instead, what it’s testing is only a person’s ability to compare the percent mix of two different colors. If you can’t “see” the colors, you won’t read anything but grey at an even tone for part, or all of a row. Color blindness being tested is complimentary, so (for example) one row tests for red/green color blindness and the degree of problem.
You can alter your score on the test by as much as 30% by taking it slowly and more often, but with a genuine physical problem, you’d have a really hard time acing it.
yes! they missed the double blind part of the experiment!
