Vermeer's paintings might be 350 year-old color photographs
It's really clever, and I enjoyed the process involved immensely. The whole project is a work of art IMHO. I'm looking forward to watching the documentary of it all.<p>I also like this conclusion.<p>> My experiment doesn't prove that Vermeer worked this way, but it proves that he COULD have worked this way.<p>I <i>do</i> take issue with the hypothesis.<p>>The way Vermeer painted this wall is consistent with a photograph. It is not consistent with human vision. If you were standing in the room that Vermeer painted, you would see that wall as a pretty even shade of off-white. The retina in your eyeball does some image processing to minimize the effect of light and shadow. To your eye, the wall appears to have far less contrast than it actually has. And if you can't see it, you can't paint it.<p>Then you can't see it through this device either.<p>I'm not an artist, but I've taken a few art classes, and one of the transformative things that happens during formal art training is that you learn to look at things in non-intuitive ways. For example, when most people are told to "draw a dog", even if they're looking at one, they reach back into their semantic memory, look up the mental function for "draw dog" and reproduce that.<p>The same thing is true for colors, brightness values, etc. A great deal of formal art education is learning to detach your visual stimulus from the semantic association you would otherwise naturally make...and perhaps reattach it to new semantic associations like "negative space" and "comparative brightness" and "relative white value". When you get really good you can even start reprocessing a scene or a model, deconstructing it in your mind and then reconstructing it via some other technique. You can go from photorealistic reproduction to complete abstraction.<p><a href="http://www.etsycreative.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/vince-low-portraits-550x660.jpg" rel="nofollow">http://www.etsycreative.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/vince...</a><p><a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/_94URbVj_t8A/SZ7v2Iw28qI/AAAAAAAAAs0/KtyBdLmQohg/s320/tina+marker+on+canvas.jpg" rel="nofollow">https://3.bp.blogspot.com/_94URbVj_t8A/SZ7v2Iw28qI/AAAAAAAAA...</a><p><a href="http://uploads2.wikiart.org/images/vincent-van-gogh/the-starry-night-1889(1).jpg" rel="nofollow">http://uploads2.wikiart.org/images/vincent-van-gogh/the-star...</a><p><a href="https://gs1.wac.edgecastcdn.net/8019B6/data.tumblr.com/e8b9914990f75a949b1dbb9b1724ab6b/tumblr_mie7raQqj91ql98k2o1_1280.jpg" rel="nofollow">https://gs1.wac.edgecastcdn.net/8019B6/data.tumblr.com/e8b99...</a><p><a href="http://www.mde-art.com/art-blog/wp-content/uploads/2009/02/abstract-portrait-face-lines-color.jpg" rel="nofollow">http://www.mde-art.com/art-blog/wp-content/uploads/2009/02/a...</a><p>I think a better hypothesis might have been "techniques at the time weren't suited to such exact reproduction of scenes, even great artists slightly distort objects and subjects in their work. Yet these paintings don't appear to suffer from such distortion, the shape and color reproduction is as exact as a tracing or photograph. There must have been a technique or tool used to assist the artist in not only tracing the shape, but reproducing the colors."