4 ms·

The film Tim’s Vermeer has a nice exposition of this theory, including a few good scenes with David Hockney himself. Great Look the intersections of art, techno

• greglindahl 9y ago
  I wish people would be a lot more focused on Tim's experiment than Hockney's theory. Great documentary, and Tim is a great hacker and a participant in the community.
  • StavrosK 9y ago
    Tim's experiment was very convincing for me, a layman. Especially the fact that it reproduced details that the brain can't really process well enough to draw (e.g. the subtle changes of color of the wall) and the fact that the paintings exhibit optical defects such as lens blur, aberration, vignetting, etc, is pretty stong evidence to this theory.
    • greglindahl 9y ago
      Yeah, the problem with it is that while it's proof that you can do that with Vermeer's technology, there's no proof that Vermeer did it that way. And there are no artifacts like those lenses and mirrors found in illustrations of painting workshops or artifact collections, and no books or other documents that talk about that technique. It would be awesome an art historian would look at a bunch of paintings for those defects, or if someone could work out how many portraits are 1:1 scale, like Tim's second "Claire with a Pearl Earring" experiment.
      • StavrosK 9y ago
        Yeah, very true. However, isn't the color aberrations in the paintings a dead giveaway that a lens was used? You can't really get aberrations any other way!
        • greglindahl 9y ago
          Yeah, I like that one. I also like the argument about the brightness gradient in the white wall being super accurate. But these sorts of arguments aren't considered strong by critics. Now imagine that we found a half-burned-down painter's workshop in the countryside, with a bunch of artifacts. Or a woodcut or drawing of a painter's workshop with these devices in use. Those would be very convincing to a critic. But we don't have those.
          • StavrosK 9y ago
            Yeah, fair enough, I guess I just disagree with critics there because chromatic aberration is a very specific defect, and not just "random colors gone wrong". Art critics will know more than me on this, though, so they must have their reasons. Hopefully we will find a workshop somewhere with a bunch of photographic equipment and crack this puzzle.
            • igravious 9y ago
              Yeah, http://www.yeahyeahyeahs.com/ http://www.yeahyeahyeahs.com/
              • mysterypie 9y ago
                What's with the spam link? You have a really good comment history, so I'm thinking either your account has been penetrated or somehow your "yeah" was autocorrected to a bogus hyperlink, or you meant to link something else.
                • igravious 9y ago
                  Thank you for the compliment about my comment history. There is an alternative explanation. A surfeit of eggnog. Luckily I didn't post this link: http://flaminglips.com/history/songs/the-yeah-yeah-yeah-song/ http://flaminglips.com/history/songs/the-yeah-yeah-yeah-song...
          • 9y ago
• anigbrowl 9y ago
  It's a cupser-cool project, but it's sad that it only half-engages with its subject. Tim builds himself a replica of Vermeer's studio and then painstakingly commits a visual record of it to canvas using optical tools. There's virtually no discussion of the design of Vermeer's paintings, which was elaborate to say the very least. I was so hopeful that time would apply his technique to some other subject, but it stays almost myopically focused on the rendering process.
• klenwell 9y ago
  I was first introduced to Hockney's theory in a New Yorker article from 2000. The full article isn't available online unless you have a subscription but you can find a summary of sorts here: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2000/01/31/the-looking-glass https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2000/01/31/the-looking-gl... It looks like the article preceded publication of Hockney's book and originated at a time when he was still rehearsing and refining his argument. His main antagonists in the article are the art historians who come off a bit like stuffy reactionaries. I was firmly in Hockney's camp by the time I had finished the article. It was one of those ideas that changed the way I look at the world slightly. Never read the book. Tim's Vermeer was the coup de grace for me and I was gratified to see Hockney make a cameo in it.