Vermeer, The Little Street (1657-58)

I’m thinking of deconstructing Vermeer’s urban landscape in some way. I see parallels with my own interest in portals- windows, doors, openings, viewpoints as metaphors for the way in which the unconscious and conscious communicate. I’m interested in the paintings negative and positive spaces and balance of light and shade. I want to explore it and dismantle it to better grasp its mastery. It’s rhythms and balance. I may attempt to take the central whitewashed masonry for example and make a sculpture of it. Or perhaps take the painting apart layer by layer and scribe or sandblast it onto stone panels to extract and abstract it’s representationality and explore its sculptural qualities. But also as a comment on its instant-in-time socio-economic, proto-photographic qualities. Bourgeois Vermeer depicting the servants as faceless operatives, ant-like, ornamenting his composition or scrubbing his canvas until it glistens. Sandblasting a version of this into slate, minus the servants, as a sort of black and white stone photocopy with the workers air brushed out as a way of drawing the viewer’s attention back to the original to be seen in a different way. (Berger). Or even finding a way to sandblast the figures only, without the architecture.