Tim's Vermeer is kind of bad in my opinion. A lot of the musing border on misinformation. If you're not a painter, it sounds great, but if you have some trainin

Tim's Vermeer is kind of bad in my opinion. A lot of the musing border on misinformation. If you're not a painter, it sounds great, but if you have some training, it's a very frustrating doc. The resulting painting is neat, but it was immediately obvious (at least to my eyes) how different his result was from Vermeer's. Hockney, one of the featured 'expert painters' is a hack who doesn't actually know how to paint* and therefore claims that certain gradations are certainly impossible without some sort of additional lens device. Meanwhile there are 19 year olds at the Grand Central Atelier pulling off just that. I own a camera lucida. It got in the way more than it helped. At best, it's a novelty, now collecting lots of dust. Vermeer probably had one but it's altogether way more likely that he just had a well-trained observational/representational faculty. There are some killer painters using cameras now (Will St. John for one) but they typically have a decade or more of very rigorous direct observation to lean on. I suggest following Ramon Alex Hurtado. IMO he's one of the more exciting young scholars on historical representational painting techniques. I don't think he has written anything himself yet, but he does do workshops and has a big informational update for his website coming. *the definition of painting is now so broad it is meaningless. Here, I mean "attempting some degree of visual accuracy" which can be achieved in endless creative ways. Compare (easily on instagram): - Colleen Barry - Peder Mørk Mønsted - Cecelia Beaux - Jas Knight - Felicia Forte - Eric Johnson - Ksenya Istomena - Sergei Danchev - Glenn Dean - Blair Atherholt - Jose Lopez Vegara - Hongnian Zhang - Hans Baluschek These artists all have their own voice and stylistic choices. They also all represent things they see with some sincere accuracy. Look up Hockney's ipad paintings he got lauded for. People treat them like they're some misunderstood genius, but really, they're just bad paintings. I'm sure he's a sweet old man and I'd drink tea with him. But if it weren't for his ilk I might have found proper instruction 10 years earlier in life. Modernists and postmodernists robbed generations of proper art instruction. Imagine if all the music teachers burned all the sheet music and refused (or forgot how) to teach the diatonic scale. "Hit the keys in a new way! Don't let yourself be bound by conformist ideals!" P.S. I'm not fun at parties