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Dave,
I have that book too. It's another instance of scholars going out too far into the realm of conjecture on too slender a basis, and then overstating their case with misleading language. What they consider "convincing," I consider much less convincing. All it is is speculation.
I had a personal experience that quite likely stems from the same line of thinking that produced that speculation. Long ago, another artist in my acquaintance began speading rumors that I worked with a projector. It wasn't true, and when I asked her why she said that, she said she felt my work was too realistic to have been done freehand, so she deduced that therefore I must be using a projector. Well, the fact is that everything I did was done freehand by eyeball judgment, including the things this lady couldn't believe were done without a projector. So I see a similar psychological mechanism at work in the minds of these scholars who cannot draw or paint with Vermeer's precision themselves, so they surmise that Vermeer must not have been able to do it freehand himself. From my perspective I have no trouble envisioning him doing it all by unaided eye and hand, with talent as the enabling factor.
A picture can be art, or it can be just a picture. What makes art special is that each work of art is unique, the product of an individual artist who sees and expresses himself/herself in an individual way. Each is different, and that is why it's valuable. That individuality, that distinctness, is compromised when any part of the process is circumvented by the use of a machine instead of the artist's eye, hand, judgment and interpretation. Each artist adjusts as he/she draws, consciously or intuitively doing it in a way that no one else does, and the result will not be the same from one artist to the next when things are done the natural way, even when working from the same model.
Suppose there are ten thousand painters all working from projected photographs. How much will the personal individuality of each one of them come through in the work? I maintain that they will be too similar to one another, not distinct enough from one another to be identifiable as one particular painter versus another who works the same way with the same approximate equipment. It is precisely that distinctness that gives art its value. Photographs are less valuable because they are the product of a mechanical process to a much greater extent than a painting, which is (or ought to be) the product of the mind and creative processes of an artist, i.e., a uniquely talented individual.
So with that in mind, the question is, do you want to just make pictures, or do you want to make art?
Virgil Elliott
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