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 probably obvious already to many, the parallel between that and the way that we sort of do that when we look at paintings suddenly hit me.
pcblues · 52m ago
Not sure if anyone here saw the movie Clueless, but a great quote was, "That guy is such a Monet. From a distance he looks great, but up close he's a real mess."
roughly · 3h ago
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.
nandomrumber · 26m ago
Who’s that fella what did that TV show where he paints portraits of his famous guests.
kylebenzle · 1h ago
I read a lot of sci-fi and because it's come up in recommendations I've tried two or three times to read that book, "This Is How You Lose the Time War".
The popularity of that book along with stuff like N.K. Jemisin winning "Best SciFi book" of the year 3 years in a row prove more than ever that the vast majority of people simply don't have taste in the sense they can not decide if they actually like something or not they can only like what other people like.
That book was objectively bad but it keeps showing up on the top of best sci-fi book lists for some reason and so a lot of people keep (mistakingly) thinking they liked it.
gilleain · 1h ago
Are you not confusing 'liking' a work with 'thinking it good'. I'm not sure what criteria go into your evaluation, but perhaps those criteria are different from the ones other people are using?
roughly · 1h ago
> objectively bad
Well that settles that, then.
fish_phrenology · 1h ago
It took a bit but by the end it had grown on me. I agree it's technically not great but maybe I'm just used to that from reading sci-fi, most of which feels technically bad. That said my reaction to the first quarter was mostly "uhh?". Big disagree on N.K. Jemisin though, I enjoyed reading those. Books 2 and 3 of the three body problem series feel like what you're describing to me. Never got why those were popular, the first one had the interesting cultural revolution flashback element but the sequels did almost nothing for me.
Filling-in-the-gaps-books wise, it's hard to do better than Earthsea in my mind. They're quite short books, yet I found myself far more engrossed in the world and the goings-on than some thousand page Sanderson tomb I snoozed through.
eru · 5m ago
I already felt pretty annoyed with the first Three Body Problem book.
But a big part of the problem is that after looking into space colonisation etc a bit, the aliens in most alien invasion stories feel utterly stupid to me.
I can still live with 'War of the worlds': their aliens only come from Mars not from the stars, and I can suspend my disbelief over eg its theory of how the planets formed: it's just a fantasy world where outer planets formed earlier and are older.
But the Three Body Problem tries to be current-ish with modern technology. And its aliens have enough technology to just build orbitals or terraform Mars or so. Or just kill off all the humans from space with an orbital bombardment or a killer virus. Instead of whatever clunky and ineffective methods they use in the book.
I did like the start though, when things were still kept behind the curtain. Also the Cultural Revolution flashbacks, too.
War of the Worlds never lifts that curtain for sure. Everything stays fairly mysterious, and the narrative only gives us some limited speculation from the narrator who clearly has also only a limited view on things.
pests · 1h ago
> interesting cultural revolution flashback element
Interestingly this section either appeared in the beginning or somewhere in the middle depending on the translation/version (I forget how the distinction was made) due to it being so different from the rest of the book.
It was in the beginning when I read it years ago and I think it took a bit for its context to make sense but I also read many lost interest during it.
I enjoyed all the books. (spoilers incoming) I actually enjoyed the love story elements, how a star given to someone would play such an important role later. How he survived in the end and communicated the three fairy tales, and enjoyed each in turn. I've never seen a story span such a vast amount of time nor remember one that took us literally to the end.
michaelhoney · 28m ago
... or maybe it's not objectively bad, and you're bouncing off it for some reason?
Per the parent comment, it does a lot with very little. And it's heady and literary and beautiful. Not everyone is into that. But a lot of people are.
userbinator · 4h ago
Zooming in, it's a bit of a muddy mess
The analog equivalent of pixelation.
jychang · 33m ago
More like the analog version of doing a FTT and looking at only the high frequency parts vs the low frequency parts.
cgriswald · 4h ago
It's like touching it with your eye, without the pain. I love the future.
HideousKojima · 4h ago
It's like the museum scene from Ferris Bueller's Day Off when Cameron is staring super intently at the painting
cmehdy · 3h ago
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.
fcatalan · 1h ago
You can also see that the hanging yellow part of the headscarf, he just winged it, effective as it might be.
I paint as a sort of weekly ritual, just 2 hours every Wednesday evening, and did an inept copy of this as my first serious try. Months of staring closely at every little detail of it leave you in a sort of communion with the work and the artist.
One thing you quickly learn is that the old masters were "impressionists" too. If you overwork stuff trying to perfect every shape with hundreds of precise brushstrokes, you end up with a naive, infantile looking painting that feels "unpainterly".
Trying and failing to mimic that single quick brushtroke that fools the eye leaves you in awe, fully appreciating the mastery.
drob518 · 3h ago
Yep, I noticed the same thing and came to a similar realization.
lubujackson · 4h ago
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.
dewarrn1 · 3h ago
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.
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.
y-curious · 3h ago
Thank you! I watched some clips on YouTube and I'm very impressed by Tim's technique's efficacy.
diego_moita · 4h ago
It isn't a bad hypothesis.
Many people speculate that the model for the "The Astronomer" and "The Geographer" was Leeuwenhoek, the creator of the first microscope. He was a close friend of Vermeer.
And the use of devices for helping in drawing was actually quite common in those times. Durer and Da Vinci made drawings showing these kind of devices.
noufalibrahim · 13m ago
It's a great science documentary though. His obsession, how he works towards it and the emotional effect the whole project has on him. Worth watching regardless of your opinion on the hypothesis.
koliber · 19m ago
When you zoom in on the cracks, you can see the bevel on the edge of the crack. That’s incredible.
In many places on the edges of the cracks in the dark background you can see tinges of blue or pink color. Is that from the lighting, or is the color actually there, if it is there, anyone have an idea why?
geuis · 1h ago
This painting really needs some Baumgartner intervention.
There are hints of overpainting around the right eye (left side facing us). Background plus eyebrow. Too smooth, doesn't have the same crackle as the rest of the painting.
The veneer may be quite yellowed. Looking at the cloth on the top of the head over the blue fabric. Might originally be a bright white, but now appears yellowed due to exposure of the last veneer aging and yellowing under UV light.
BrandoElFollito · 44m ago
A man of culture I see :)
I watch his restorations with onesie, but his narrative (when it's not technical) is tiring because it wants to be fancy but it sounds fake to me.
His technical work looks great to me, I have no idea about conservation outside his videos. I heard that he got a lot of hate from conservators (which I do not understand) and actively fought critical comments on his videos (which I find petty).
It's been two weeks he has not uploaded anything and it is annoying :)
BTW I also watch cow hoof trimming and always wondered how many people have such weird lists of videos (art, hoof trimming, software dev, history, action movies, science, cooking, middle age, tables building, ...) - some I do a lit, some not (I saw a cow live twice)
Joel_Mckay · 36m ago
Keep in mind many painters of the day would intentionally distort the perspective to compensate for the viewing angle.
I'm not versed enough in history of art to fully appreciate this painting and how it became so popular, could someone point me to some resources to improve my culture on the matter?
Thanks in advance for any reply
conductr · 1h ago
The artist is well known for his use of light/shadow in his works and is probably going to be the first bullet on any list. Also known for expensive pigments, an unknown style/methods , and being sloppy but extremely detailed depending on your vantage / distance. Zooming in on this one will highlight that
Thank you too from me. Ideally a youtube channel or channels
diego_moita · 4h ago
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 Maurice. It is really the former residence of Maurice of Nassau (Maurício de Nassau), the governor of the Dutch colonies in Brazil. This museum also have some interesting works by Rugendas and other painters showing life in colonial Brazil and a very cool collection of puppets made with bread paste showing life in colonial Indonesia.
The Mauritshuis is a very good reason to visit The Hague. If you go there take a walk to the M.C. Escher museum too.
Why does "Details 90x" seem to zoom in more than "Details 140x"?
pfedak · 4h ago
The main image is all at the same 90x level, and those buttons just zoom in (more or less) all the way on the points, while the "140x" are separate scan patches at higher magnification (though the real point is they have 3D/height data, too).
chrismcb · 3h ago
I'm amazed at how fast this is.
tehjoker · 51m ago
It's like Google Maps. I didn't look under the cover but typically the way these things work is there's a resolution hierarchy and it loads bits dynamically as you zoom in. The zoom here is a bit slow (it doesn't let you slam into the painting at warp speed) so there is likely a bit of latency hiding as it loads high res tiles.
Hobadee · 3h ago
Crap quality; I can't make out the individual atoms.
tehjoker · 50m ago
I half expected it to proceed to optical light microscopy or even scanning electron microscopy but the latter would have toasted the painting with radiation damage.
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 probably obvious already to many, the parallel between that and the way that we sort of do that when we look at paintings suddenly hit me.
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.
The popularity of that book along with stuff like N.K. Jemisin winning "Best SciFi book" of the year 3 years in a row prove more than ever that the vast majority of people simply don't have taste in the sense they can not decide if they actually like something or not they can only like what other people like.
That book was objectively bad but it keeps showing up on the top of best sci-fi book lists for some reason and so a lot of people keep (mistakingly) thinking they liked it.
Well that settles that, then.
Filling-in-the-gaps-books wise, it's hard to do better than Earthsea in my mind. They're quite short books, yet I found myself far more engrossed in the world and the goings-on than some thousand page Sanderson tomb I snoozed through.
But a big part of the problem is that after looking into space colonisation etc a bit, the aliens in most alien invasion stories feel utterly stupid to me.
I can still live with 'War of the worlds': their aliens only come from Mars not from the stars, and I can suspend my disbelief over eg its theory of how the planets formed: it's just a fantasy world where outer planets formed earlier and are older.
But the Three Body Problem tries to be current-ish with modern technology. And its aliens have enough technology to just build orbitals or terraform Mars or so. Or just kill off all the humans from space with an orbital bombardment or a killer virus. Instead of whatever clunky and ineffective methods they use in the book.
I did like the start though, when things were still kept behind the curtain. Also the Cultural Revolution flashbacks, too.
War of the Worlds never lifts that curtain for sure. Everything stays fairly mysterious, and the narrative only gives us some limited speculation from the narrator who clearly has also only a limited view on things.
Interestingly this section either appeared in the beginning or somewhere in the middle depending on the translation/version (I forget how the distinction was made) due to it being so different from the rest of the book.
It was in the beginning when I read it years ago and I think it took a bit for its context to make sense but I also read many lost interest during it.
I enjoyed all the books. (spoilers incoming) I actually enjoyed the love story elements, how a star given to someone would play such an important role later. How he survived in the end and communicated the three fairy tales, and enjoyed each in turn. I've never seen a story span such a vast amount of time nor remember one that took us literally to the end.
Per the parent comment, it does a lot with very little. And it's heady and literary and beautiful. Not everyone is into that. But a lot of people are.
The analog equivalent of pixelation.
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.
I paint as a sort of weekly ritual, just 2 hours every Wednesday evening, and did an inept copy of this as my first serious try. Months of staring closely at every little detail of it leave you in a sort of communion with the work and the artist.
One thing you quickly learn is that the old masters were "impressionists" too. If you overwork stuff trying to perfect every shape with hundreds of precise brushstrokes, you end up with a naive, infantile looking painting that feels "unpainterly".
Trying and failing to mimic that single quick brushtroke that fools the eye leaves you in awe, fully appreciating the mastery.
[0] https://skeptoid.com/episodes/4707
Many people speculate that the model for the "The Astronomer" and "The Geographer" was Leeuwenhoek, the creator of the first microscope. He was a close friend of Vermeer.
And the use of devices for helping in drawing was actually quite common in those times. Durer and Da Vinci made drawings showing these kind of devices.
In many places on the edges of the cracks in the dark background you can see tinges of blue or pink color. Is that from the lighting, or is the color actually there, if it is there, anyone have an idea why?
There are hints of overpainting around the right eye (left side facing us). Background plus eyebrow. Too smooth, doesn't have the same crackle as the rest of the painting.
The veneer may be quite yellowed. Looking at the cloth on the top of the head over the blue fabric. Might originally be a bright white, but now appears yellowed due to exposure of the last veneer aging and yellowing under UV light.
I watch his restorations with onesie, but his narrative (when it's not technical) is tiring because it wants to be fancy but it sounds fake to me.
His technical work looks great to me, I have no idea about conservation outside his videos. I heard that he got a lot of hate from conservators (which I do not understand) and actively fought critical comments on his videos (which I find petty).
It's been two weeks he has not uploaded anything and it is annoying :)
BTW I also watch cow hoof trimming and always wondered how many people have such weird lists of videos (art, hoof trimming, software dev, history, action movies, science, cooking, middle age, tables building, ...) - some I do a lit, some not (I saw a cow live twice)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homography
Beauty is complicated, and imperfection itself can form a timeless lesson:
https://sambourque.com/blog/kintsugi-beauty-in-imperfection
In many ways, some suggest it is an allegory for how people grow throughout their life... and for others it is just broken pottery.
Have a wonderful day, =3
Thanks in advance for any reply
* 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 Maurice. It is really the former residence of Maurice of Nassau (Maurício de Nassau), the governor of the Dutch colonies in Brazil. This museum also have some interesting works by Rugendas and other painters showing life in colonial Brazil and a very cool collection of puppets made with bread paste showing life in colonial Indonesia.
The Mauritshuis is a very good reason to visit The Hague. If you go there take a walk to the M.C. Escher museum too.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a2/Vermeer-...