Tim's Vermeer, and the Original Vermeer, Tantalize-- and Inspire

 

The Music Lesson, a copy of the original, I think. Not Tim's, I think?!

The Variety Review of "Tim's Vermeer" in which a tech genius tries to prove, by painting Johannes Vermeer's "The Music Lesson", that the great artist used optics that can be replicated by well, anyone, considers the documentary "incendiary" and as I read it, rather arrogant. 

Tim Jenison really isn't anyone in that he has the money to experiment with lenses and a whole set from which to copy the context of the painting, the piano, the windows, the chairs, the girl, the man watching her play, the tapestry, and of course, the precise lighting. I sure don't.

But I found myself riveted. First, by the fact that the Jenison spent six years on demonstrating a theory that has somewhat floated around for some time, it appears. And by the process of reconstruction and painting. It didn't make me think for one minute that Vermeer was less than brilliant. It somehow made him more brilliant, IF indeed the theory that Jenison proposes is true, and even, or especially if it's not.

And then there is the ineffable. I disagree with Variety in that I don't think Jenison was trying to prove he could do as good a job as Vermeer, assuming that the optics was the foundation of Vermeer's difference from other artists of his day, the particulars of the color and light. The movie did not attempt to compare the original with this copy. And when David Hockney, an artist of great modern repute looked at the copy, he did not say, "By Jove," Hockney is English, "Jenison this is as great as the work of the master himself!"  He simply acknowledged that the nature of the detail, for example, in the tapestry, was such using the optics that it could very well be this was the way Vermeer LOOKED at what he painted, through mirror image. Looking fleetingly at the original prints via the movie and separately at the Jenison version, I had the feeling that Jenison's leaned toward the mechanical of Vermeer's process, not the artistic.

The inspiring part?  It made me feel I should not give up on my little efforts at painting, either in some form of impressionism (which in my case means I am being lazy so I don't do too much detail) or something more real life expression. 

I felt as I watched a little of what I feel when I paint. There is this blank canvas. You begin to put color to it. And something is literally created out of nothing and becomes present.

I walked back home from the Sundance West Hollywood Theatre, past several restaurants running the Oscars over early meals, and came back home to join that audience. Maybe this week I will finish a painting of old Elwood that has been sitting on my music stand for nearly a year.