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108B Pixel Scan of Johannes Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring

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Re: 108B Pixel Scan of Johannes Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring

#21

Saw this picture at the Mauritshuis museum in The Hague. There are a couple funny things about it: * It is surprisingly small * It is kinda "fuzzy" or "blurry", you can't detect too much brushwork. * It is very expressive But my favorite Vermeer is not this, it is View of Delft, also in the Mauritshuis. The colors, hues and textures on it are just amazing. For Brazilians, a funny curiosity: Mauritshuis means House of…

Wow, View of Delft is beautiful!

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a2/Vermeer-...

Re: 108B Pixel Scan of Johannes Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring

#22

When viewing this I was captivated by the girl's lips. In the full view, the bottom lip looks not just full and moist, but slightly wet. Zooming in, it's a bit of a muddy mess with only a splash of white giving definition to the (anatomical) left of the girl's mouth. In my current incarnation I'm a fledgling novelist and one of the things I've learned is to trust the audience to 'fill in the gaps'. Although this is p…

We think that everything is made of things but we forget that everything is mostly made of nothing, and it's the gaps between things that make it all be.

See also: atomic size vs distance between atoms in any structure, on perceptual levels the visual saccadic movement and how much the brain fills in the gaps.

Nothing is quite something after all.

Re: 108B Pixel Scan of Johannes Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring

#23

I highly recommend the movie "Tim's Vermeer" about the likelihood that Vermeer used something like a lightbox to paint his paintings. Specifically, his ability to reproduce light and color is unmatched while he only had basic training as a painter and never let anyone see him work. A fascinating engineering problem to deduce how he might have accomplished this.

It's an appealing hypothesis, but there's some compelling evidence to the contrary [0]. I'm not an expert, but this could potentially fall under the heading of pop history or pseudohistory.

[0] https://skeptoid.com/episodes/4707

Re: 108B Pixel Scan of Johannes Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring

#24

I highly recommend the movie "Tim's Vermeer" about the likelihood that Vermeer used something like a lightbox to paint his paintings. Specifically, his ability to reproduce light and color is unmatched while he only had basic training as a painter and never let anyone see him work. A fascinating engineering problem to deduce how he might have accomplished this.

It's an appealing hypothesis, but there's some compelling evidence to the contrary [0]. I'm not an expert, but this could potentially fall under the heading of pop history or pseudohistory. [0] https://skeptoid.com/episodes/4707

Watch Tim’s Vermeer. The camera obscura doesn’t work (for similar reasons as mentioned in the article). Don’t want to spoil it, but Tim comes up with a very low tech solution that fits all the evidence.

Re: 108B Pixel Scan of Johannes Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring

#25
post #21

Saw this picture at the Mauritshuis museum in The Hague. There are a couple funny things about it: * It is surprisingly small * It is kinda "fuzzy" or "blurry", you can't detect too much brushwork. * It is very expressive But my favorite Vermeer is not this, it is View of Delft, also in the Mauritshuis. The colors, hues and textures on it are just amazing. For Brazilians, a funny curiosity: Mauritshuis means House of…

Wow, View of Delft is beautiful! https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a2/Vermeer-...

I feel obliged to point anyone interested to Proust on Vermeer: https://www.essentialvermeer.com/proust/proust.html

Re: 108B Pixel Scan of Johannes Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring

#26

When viewing this I was captivated by the girl's lips. In the full view, the bottom lip looks not just full and moist, but slightly wet. Zooming in, it's a bit of a muddy mess with only a splash of white giving definition to the (anatomical) left of the girl's mouth. In my current incarnation I'm a fledgling novelist and one of the things I've learned is to trust the audience to 'fill in the gaps'. Although this is p…

If you get a chance to see some of the impressionists in person, they’re kind of mind blowing for exactly the same reason - you’re looking at a scene of a ship in a storm and seeing all kinds of nuance, and then you get closer and realize it’s all your brain filling in the blanks.

From a literary angle - two books I’ve read that are absolute master classes in this are Italio Calvino’s “Invisible Cities” and “This Is How You Lose the Time War” by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone - both do an incredible job of putting you in a series of vivid, fantastical places within a paragraph or two of exposition.

Re: 108B Pixel Scan of Johannes Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring

#30

I highly recommend the movie "Tim's Vermeer" about the likelihood that Vermeer used something like a lightbox to paint his paintings. Specifically, his ability to reproduce light and color is unmatched while he only had basic training as a painter and never let anyone see him work. A fascinating engineering problem to deduce how he might have accomplished this.

Thank you! I watched some clips on YouTube and I'm very impressed by Tim's technique's efficacy.
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