A practiced meditator would find it hard to stare at prayer beads for more than a few hours, while Van Eyck must have spent days. More likely, Van Eyck spent d

A practiced meditator would find it hard to stare at prayer beads for more than a few hours, while Van Eyck must have spent days. More likely, Van Eyck spent days looking at a whole bunch of different kinds of glass and studying how light refracts through them, over the course of his art training. By the time he painted this piece he was somewhere between 44 and 54. The detailed fur on the dog also probably owes a lot to that long training. He would have known how to quickly and efficiently use the brushes he had available to lay in multiple strands of fur at once. Possibly he also loaded the brush with multiple colors so that it changed over the course of one stroke, then went back with a fine brush to tweak some highlights. Or scraped off some of the paint after doing a simple, fat stroke. Which, I suppose, relates to some of the things discussed later in this rambling post, where the creation of an imaginary simple drawing app leads to the idea of functions: a way to encapsulate something complex into a simpler thing that's easy to use.