Channeling Vermeer

The painter Jonathan Janson does an amazing job channeling the spirit of Jan Vermeer in the creation of his nonetheless rather contemporary paintings. (His website here.)

You might be surprised to know that Janson is not shy about sharing the secrets of painting like this old master. His website offers discs and a book on how to imitate the working method and technique of the 17th century Delft painter. The book is a very worthy effort, but like a lot of self-published books it suffers terribly from a lack of editing. (The copy I bought has substantial groups of pages that were cut and pasted to reappear in other places in the book as if Janson was not quite sure where they really belonged.) Nonetheless, his gist of the method is reasonably presented and very workable for the average painter.

Janson's affection for Vermeer goes even further in his highly developed website, the Essential Vermeer, which includes a number of quite useful devices seldom encountered on the internet, like a scale comparison of each of Vermeer's paintings and a thorough discussion of Vermeer's probable use of the camera obsucra.