From “Subject and Master: Figurative Art” in The Joy of Art: How to Look At, Appreciate, and Talk about Art by Carolyn Schlam:
“Pictures tell a story in their own inimitable way. If a thought or idea was totally understandable in words, we would not need pictures, but the truth is that we depend on our eyes to gather much information and to appreciate the world we live in and that artists imagine for us.
“We now greatly depend on still photographs and moving images (i.e. film) to fill us in on visual matters. As a result, we do not have the dependency on drawings and paintings to describe what we actually see, a function it performed for centuries. Portraiture, in particular, provided a record of what people actually looked like, and was not only prized, but was an almost essential service….
“A Dutch figurative artist, [Johannes] Vermeer’s world is a small and very meticulous one. His scenes are set in two of the rooms in his Delft house, and much has been speculated about optical devices he may have utilized in the creation of his amazingly masterful work.
“In addition to his careful drawing, he is known for his beautiful application of paint. He used an extensive and expensive palette of pigments including ultramarine blue, not common in the seventeenth century. He built the color with reflected tones from adjacent hues.
“[The] very well-known Girl with a Pearl Earring is an example of his extraordinary sensitivity, soft color, and expressive quality. No Impressionist would give you that black background, but it is so beautiful here as it sets off the sweet light on her face and costume.
“Only a small sampling of Vermeer’s exquisite paintings are known, but his attention to detail is esteemed worldwide. He was a unique voice in portrait painting, never imitated and probably never surpassed.”
From “Head of a Young Girl: Vermeer” in The Eye that Desires to Look Upward: Poems by Steven Cramer:
How long it must have taken to arrange
her knotted turban, the exact slope of her shoulder,
her face adrift in a vacuum of black space;
and that startled look, as if I’d just touched her
lightly, teasingly, on the nape of her neck,
and then, too late, realized my mistake.
Her eyes round out like the red mound
of her lower lip; her face circles toward me
and away…
This morning I write to you
about a face I’ve loved from afar too long,
when all the time it’s the black background
I care for and stare at, while she stares back,
as if to bid me walk with her, into the dark,
into whatever she grows out of and returns to;
and isn’t this the way I look at you —
no more than a yard of air between us,
across the inevitable space between people
learning to face what they want?
Hello!
This is the third of three posts where I took some of my recent photographs of chrysanthemums and daisies, and “painted” their backgrounds black. The first post — with a description of my workflow for creating images like this and some chatter about Paint-by-Number and Velvet Painting — is Glow-in-the-Dark Mums and Daisies (1 of 3) and the second post is Glow-in-the-Dark Mums and Daisies (2 of 3).
The poem “Head of a Young Girl: Vermeer” above is about the famous Johannes Vermeer painting Girl with a Pearl Earring (c. 1665). This type of poem, I have learned, is called an ekphrastic poem — after ekphrasis, an act of engaging with one art form using another. This engagement is usually a vibrant, rhetorical dialogue between two art forms, a distinction made to differentiate ekphrasis from an ordinary text description of, say, a painting or a photograph.
The two stanzas I excerpted above are part of a much longer poem — seven stanzas about the same length as those above — and the poet, Steven Cramer, alternates seamlessly between describing the Vermeer painting and writing about the girl in the pearl earring as if she exists in his version of the real world. At one point, he “encounters” her in a bookstore, as an image on a card, staring at him — so he buys the card. I thought all this was an interesting way to observe a piece of art, about which we can create a complex description but can’t quite possess, even in its commercialized form as a copy of a famous painting on a postcard.
The Wikipedia page for ekphrasis includes other examples of ekphrastic poetry, along with examples of music intended to reflect painted scenes. A slight twist on this might be paintings of musical rehearsals or performances — such as those of Vermeer and his contemporaries — that you can see here: Vermeer and Music: The Art of Love and Leisure.
Vermeer’s painting The Music Lesson is among those featured on that page, and that painting is often included in analyses of Vermeer’s probable use of a camera obscura and mirrors to project scenes he was going to paint on a canvas. The Music Lesson shows several characteristics of the potential use of a camera, even an early one, such as the double shadows behind the painting hanging on the wall above the performer and those beneath the harpsichord, as well as how the ceiling and walls aren’t precisely perpendicular, exhibiting the barrel distortion (or slight bowing) that is common even with modern wide-angle lenses.
If these subjects interest you, Traces of Vermeer by Jane Jelley is a very fine book that explains the use of camera technology by Vermeer and other artists at the time, and includes images of nearly all of Vermeer’s paintings.
Thanks for reading and taking a look!
