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While I'm on the subject, I also totally recommend Tim's Vermeer, a documentary by Penn and Teller (of all people) about their friend Tim Jenison, a wealthy, talented, and insatiably curious obsessive, and his attempt to figure out and to duplicate how Vermeer painted his various masterpieces. He appears to have solved the mystery of Vermeer's hyper-realism by a combination of intuition, insight, and very hard work, and the result is amazing.

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Finding Vivian Maier

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Stephen, the movie is, or ought to be, viewed as a hypothesis, a possible explanation if that's not too offensive a word, of how Vermeer might have executed his paintings, or some of his paintings. You seem to share the Guardian's critic's ruffled feathers that somehow Jenison's efforts cheapen or demean or invalidate Vermeer's rightful claim to have been a great artist; that somehow Jenison has committed some foul act by investigating one possible method by which Vermeer got the effects that he did. I read both Jelley's paper and quite bit of the back-and-forth on the essential Vermeer website, and am no more convinced of Jelley's hypothesis than of Jenison's; in fact, even less so. And there are painters and critics who side with Jenison, as the several posts make clear. You do have the advantage of me in that you are utterly persuaded that Jenison is wrong, when I don't know that we'll ever know-- somebody destroyed the videotapes that showed Vermeer at work. But I myself never got the impression that Vermeer's integrity or worth or genius as an artist was ever at issue in the documentary. In fact I'd bet serious money that Tim's Vermeer does more to spur interest in and appreciation of Vermeer than anything written about him in the last 20 years at a minimum. And your flamenco analogy doesn't work at all for me. Better to refer to a debate about the true origins of flamenco rather than nails in shoes, etc.; that's really the more accurate analogy.

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I happen to be a big fan of well-executed "luminous" art, and am enamored of the Luminist movement in 19th century American art-- the works of Kensett, Heade, Fitz Hugh Lane, Sanford Gifford and others. One of the moments that I'll remember always is entering a room in the Philly Art Museum that held many of the great classics of American Luminism on its walls-- this was a special show on American landscape art of several genres put together by a British agency, and making the rounds of American museums-- after leaving the gigantic paintings of Church, Bierstadt & company, I experienced an actual shock, chill, thrill when entering this small room and feeling almost an actual radiation of energy emanating from these canvasses; I remember shaking all over. Amazing.

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ORIGINAL: BarkellWH

an artist (actually a graphic artist) who is in a category all his own is M.C. Escher. Escher's prints deceive the eye as well, but they belong to neither trompe l'oeil nor surrealist genres. Escher's prints explore and illustrate impossible activity, infinite loops, and objects morphing into other objects.

One of his pieces, entitled "Ascending and Descending" portrays groups of people in an infinite loop of stairs. Another, "Drawing Hands," portrays a pair of hands, each drawing the other. Another, "Waterfall," portrays what appears to be ducts carrying water which falls down at the end of one into a pool, and when the eye meets the water being carried by the ducts, one realizes it was not above the pool as it first appeared, although the water and ducts appear to be ascending in an impossible illusion.

There are whole books of Escher's illustrations and prints, and it is very entertaining to go through them.

Bill

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I agree that we may have a semantic snafu-- maybe several. I am compelled, by my nature, to use the term "Luminism" in the sense, the definition, the parameters, the usage, of those several art specialists who have defined and elucidated the concept. The examples that are offered by these specialists as displaying the several attributes of the Luminist canon are as coherent a group of paintings as one could wish. I guess, like Wilmerding, Novak, Baur, John Paul Driscoll, John Howat, I'm a tight ass when it comes to what is or isn't Luminism. I am also a tight ass about what is or isn't flamenco. BTW I don't get your suggestion that because Wilmerding has/had a great collection of Luminist (and other) American landscape art, he is somehow suspect in his views on Luminism. What would happen if we applied such a test to people writing about flamenco? Again, I say Sheesh!




But we do share an appreciation for Luminist art, for Inness, for Ryder. I find American painting in general to be my particular cup of tea. And I really like your cicadas.