I have a hard time understanding the dilemma here. Could someone please break it down? What difference would it have made to use mirrors and lenses, and how would that have improved his paintings?
Okay. Working out perspective by hand is hard. It's a lot of work, that takes a lot of arcane knowledge.
So's doing a photorealistic painting of a thing. You have to look at the thing, consider a bunch of relationships of the particular feature you're interested in at this very moment, and transfer those relationships to your canvas. That's a pretty complicated set of habits and brain circuitry you have to build up over a period of years.
Tracing an image is immensely easier. There's all the perspective, there's all the proportion relationships. There's all the colors. Right there in front of you. You can spend an hour or two essentially doing manual edge-detection, and then start filling in areas.
There's still stuff to learn - how to mix the paint to get the colors you want, how to apply it to the canvas, stuff like that. And if you trace organic stuff too closely, it starts to look stiff and dead. But compared to the amount of skill you have to learn to draw this kind of stuff out of your head? It's nothing.
I mean, hell. Take a photo, print it out. Tape it to a sunny window, tape another piece of paper over it, and trace it. Then take that same photo and try to draw a copy of it, without tracing. There will be a huge difference between the two drawings you just made. The one made without tracing will probably have taken a lot longer, and have many more bits erased and redrawn.
A lot of modern artists have this weird thing going on with respect to tracing. It's the worst thing ever, they'll say. Tracing another person's work to learn from, or tracing off of a photo, they're different kinds of art crimes, but they're still art crimes. Leaping around learning to break a scene down in your head and reconstruct it from scratch - essentially building a wetware 3D modeller in your brain, really - is considered CHEATING by some people.
So Hockney's book on Vermeer's work is essentially saying "dude Vermeer was totally a tracer". Which in many artist's eyes is like calling him Not An Artist. Artists get weird about what is Art and what is Not Art, it's this whole thing that's about as inexplicable to a layperson as a programmer's choice of text editor.
By using mirrors and lenses to project an image onto his camera to trace, Vermeer only had to learn the basic painting technique stuff. If he did, if he traced all this stuff, then some people will start saying that his work is no longer Art. It's just Illustration. Which, in the eyes of people who care about this, means that it is a lower, less respectable thing. Now it's just a filter applied to an image, albiet manually instead of via Photoshop or whatever.
The truth of the matter (IMHO) is that a lot of the people who will scream bloody murder when someone is tracing are amateurs. Real pros can and will project images and work over them, build reference models in the real world or in 3D programs, and do any damn thing they can to make the hard parts of their work easier, to get all those little details they'd never make up out of whole cloth.
I am pretty sure I've repeated myself a couple times here, thanks to the tiny window HN allows to type in. But hopefully this helps.
tl;dr: If Vermeer used these techniques then he's a dirty cheating TRACER and is thus not a REAL ARTIST in some people's eyes.
No one says photo-realistic painters are fakers or cheaters when they recreate photographs on the canvas. Working from a photo does a lot of the same work as a camera obscura; it flattens the perspective, defines the colors, etc.
Insightful comment... sorry to only directly reference this line, but you can expand the text field by using the drag-handle in the lower-right.
Yes, tracing images is immensely easier. Problem is it yields lousy paintings. Photographs have different perspective and lighting than what you see with your own eyes and paintings that have been made by tracing or even merely copying photographs almost always look, well, like someone smeared paint all over a photograph.
If you look at a Vermeer painting, you'll find it does not look photographic at all. The objects in the picture are almost tangible and seem to jump off the canvas. This is an effect that is only achievable by having very strong 3D skills: you basically have to be able to paint even more realistically than mere realism. So it might very well be that Vermeer used some tools to get a feel for what it was he was going to paint and maybe even to study the fleeting effects of lighting, but the final paintings themselves are without a doubt made by someone with exceptional skill.
TL;DR;Vermeer did not use these techniques because his paintings are way better than what can be achieved using only these techniques.
I disagree with you. I believe that Vermeer used photographic techniques to aid him. It is very obvious to me (imho) that Vermeer's works is of a wholly different character than any other Dutch masters working at the time. His paintings are incredibly flat and tonal, and very, very photographic.
I also think that his compositions are his true genius. His compositions are beyond masterful. They are brilliant. This is hard to describe to a non-artist, but the way that he uses tight negative spacing along with his use of large spacious gradations is magic. He had the eye of a master photographer. This is where the question comes in for me. Did he set up his scenes and then limit himself to what he was able to manage there, just tracing what he saw? Or did he allow himself the freedom to change and modify the spaces and proportions to what looked right to him. I personally believe the latter.
To me, Vermeer is one of the greatest photographers thats ever lived. Every 2D design class should devote long study to his compositions.
If using unconventional tools is part of your assigning value to artwork/artists or not, is another question.
It's also true that his work is much flatter than that of his contemporaries, but to my eyes there's still a lot of 3D construction lurking behind those dazzling light effects that is completely missing in paintings that we know for sure have been made as copies of photographs. Like I said, to me Vermeer is a much better painter than the grandparent gives him credit for.