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George Deem
Pictures are the subjects of George Deem's paintings: pictures by Courbet and Manet, Frans Hals and Vermeer, Velazquez and Hobbema, and numerous other masters of European and American painting. … Through their ordering of pictorial space and color, (Deem's paintings) are demonstrably a newly structured total form. This is something which has been constant in modern art since Cezanne and Manet: subject as variation upon a given theme. …Earlier painting is the subject of a present artistic activity, one dealt with appropriately as such, incorporating the information which the old pictures transmit …Thus the past itself is unfixed, can be changed, and newly discovered by each generation. Every newly created work of art, as it continues the tradition, changes our view of the past.
(Udo Kultermann, George Deem, exhibition catalogue, translated from German by an unknown translator, Essen: Galerie M. E. Thelen, December 1969 - January 1970)
The Art of Art History
George Deem (1932-2008) had a unique vision of the masterpieces of the past and a passion for the history of art in general. This combination inspired him to create paintings that are both visions and revisions. This exhibition (George Deem: The Art of Art History, The Boston Athenaeum, April 11 - September 1, 2012) focuses on that part of Deem's oeuvre for which he found specific inspiration in two favorite sources: paintings by the seventeenth-century Dutch master Johannes Vermeer and those by American artists such as Winslow Homer and John Singer Sargent. In his analysis and interpretation of these artists' works, Deem made his own, important contribution to the history of art. ... By the 1970s, Deem's work was attracting the attention of prominent critics and art historians such as Arthur Danto and Robert Rosenblum. Over the next several decades, these and other writers stated their admiration for Deem's theatricality and sense of play and praised him for having rejected satire and caustic wit in favor of "the winsome and gracious." Deem was classified variously as a Pop artist, a Figurative Realist, a Deconstructionist, a Proto-Post-Modernist, a Post-Modernist, and a Post-Post-Modernist. With work that defies reduction to a single, simply defined topical or stylistic category, George Deem created something new and, to borrow composer Stephen Sondheim's phrase, "gave us more to see." (David B. Dearinger, George Deem: The Art of Art History, The Boston Athenaeum, 2012).
Synergy
K216.01 a concerto for eViolin and Synthesizer Ensemble, Lameduck Music, P.O. Box 842, Ithaca, NY 14851. K216.01 is, like much of my recent work, a polyphonic composite utilizing a melodic part from another composition. In this case, Mozart's Violin Concerto No. 3 in G Major. While there are precedents for this kind of work, it has not been in vogue since the 15th century (outside of the Baroque Chorale-based pieces). Also, this is a more radical approach since it does not alter the original part in any way. These works receive their inspiration from Buckminster Fuller's definition of synergy ( ... behavior of whole systems unpredicted by the behavior of their parts taken separately) and by the work of painters Chuck Close, George Deem and Roy Lichtenstein. Close starts with a photograph of a human head he then transforms into a unique painting. Some of Lichtenstein's work (like Femme Au Chapeau) is based entirely on paintings from history. George Deem has based many of his paintings on Vermeer's work and others, especially in his "school" series. In each case this method forces the use of techniques different from those normally at the artist's command. The results are surprisingly distinct from the catalysts. I hope this is the case with these musical works as well. (David Borden, Ithaca NY, August 18, 2003).
What Deem Did
False Start -- Art History and Visual Culture blog: George Deem (American, 1932 - 2008).
First Solo Exhibition
George Deem (Allan Stone Gallery; to Nov. 9) is superbly able to lift from his subjects their face values and carry out his own purposes with a beautiful disregard for the historical demands. Recent work concerns master paintings, not as pop art, but, traditionally, as subjects. The Hals lady with tankard and owl is repeated six times and has six distinct and inventive statements to make about color, light, jokes, paintings. A Painting for a Library, a warm grisaille synthesis of every nineteenth-century Greco-Roman Information Desk portrait, looks at the toga-set in coffee-break attitudes and makes mock of style and subject directly yet marvelously. Deem is not content with parody, but builds a taut luminous painting to complete his image of himself. His Degas', Corots, English portraitists are born with their own beginnings as Deem paints a new work every time with sensitive, serious dynamics. (Prices: $150-$650.) (Valerie Petersen, ArtNews, New York, October 1963).
The Art of George Deem
The richness of much of Deem results from the art history he conjures and the striking artistic skill he employs. His eye and his hand are always mediating between -- and are mediated through -- the complex moments of our art historical memory, and his. Though concentrating on Vermeer in the later stages of his career, Deem was able to conjure many different painters and their styles. Having done so over a wide range of art history, however, Deem's style is unified by his craftsmanship. He clearly knew how to "lay the paint" and he was possessed of a superb draftsmanship. Mere virtuosity, which we associate with skill that has limited purpose, is nevertheless not what dominates in our viewing his work. The deep purposiveness of a Deem painting comes in large measure from his desire, a desire, as Joseph Conrad put it, "above all, to make you see." Formulations of just exactly what Deem wants us to see must include several elements, each associated with a somewhat different pictorial rhetoric. The persistence of someone's masterly vision; the uncanny way that uncanny things occur in time; the multiple frames of cognition involved in representation; the higher truth of an invested memory: all these and more await the patient viewer of a Deem.
… By choosing not to employ the entirety of a previous work, or not simply to collage a portion of some earlier representation, Deem makes use of one of the more powerful rhetorical effects that occur in art. He invokes presence through absence. This invocation resounds with its reverse as well, as the wealth of there-ness surreptitiously points to what is gone. Together the dialectical exchange between absence and presence brings up notions of pleasure, as experience morphs into new forms and fresh forces. Deem's work is also charged with praise, as the level of his skill becomes a testament to his admiration and feeling of intimacy with masterpieces from the past. A sense, at once distant and grasping, enters into the way the Deem effect disaggregates the organic formalism of a work only to see it come into focus in a different framework; this reanimates the esthetic truism that art has been achieved when viewers see something new each time they truly engage a rich work. Parts and wholes, surfaces and depths: Deem painted in a way that the relations between these elements always crackle with energy.
(Charles Molesworth, "Presence and Pleasure in the Art of George Deem," catalogue published in conjunction with memorial exhibitions at the Allan Stone Gallery and at Pavel Zoubok Gallery, New York, January 8 - February 21, 2009).
Adding by Subtraction
Vermeer's interiors are peopled with attention-drawing figures whose dress and everyday activities make us dream of things past. But Vermeer is also a much-cited master of perspective, that pictorial device to render space which became a prescriptive standard for judging skills in realism, where dreaming is no longer admitted. Vermeer's rooms are turned into spaces of breathtaking suspense in George Deem's fictions of what they are in addition to their being the settings for domestic scenes. This is the art of adding by subtraction.
Take a Vermeer, subtract figures, furniture, props, and much more emerges. Subtract the temptation to allegorize and you get newly focused vision. Elongated or widened rooms suddenly reveal their artifice. Deem's interiors are explorations of how to paint beyond the realism that makes things invisible through routine perception.
In Extended Vermeer the shadow of the window-wall inhabits the bright reflection coming as if from a door opening. Shadow and light extend the space of the painting. The blue-upholstered chair is waiting for someone bold enough to sit in light and shade, willing to let the shadow of the past be cast over him so that he can in turn illuminate the presence of the past. That chair: Deem's self-portrait.
Now, let us look at painting not as product but as action. In Painting Perspective perspective is caught in the act of trying to deceive us. Smudges of paint and lines drawn through the wall with its leaded-glass windows draw the eye to a perspectival image whose vanishing point swerves to the left. But then we hit the wall directly before us where a map tells not about the wide world but about the flatness of the picture.
Deem's probing of representation as the production of imaginary spaces is not limited to Vermeer. The hanging glass orb, evoking the mirror in Van Eyck's famous Arnolfini wedding scene, does not mirror us but in its roundness reflects the smudges of paint on the left wall. The curtain is raised so that we can look into the kitchen where the miraculous world of painting is fabricated. The mirror reflects the act of painting in history. Vermeer after Van Eyck, Deem after Vermeer. Now, and then. (Mieke Bal, Exhibition brochure announcement Pavel Zoubok Gallery, New York, March-April 2002).
Painting Perspective
...George Deem's preferred medium is painting, and his preferred painter is Vermeer, an artist whose pictures (both as originals and in reproduction) preoccupied him for over forty years. ...For viewers well-acquainted with Vermeer's oeuvre, Deem's concoctions look eerily familiar in their unfamiliarity and vice versa. Consider, for example, his Painting Perspective of 2001. ...The origins of what might be termed the component parts of Painting Perspective are not difficult to identify, but the collective effect is remarkable: we gaze upon an inordinately large interior, devoid of figures and almost gymnasium-like in scale, as the noted Vermeer scholar Walter Liedtke observed during a public discussion of this painting and others by Deem during an exhibition held at Pavel Zoubok Gallery in New York City in 2002. Deem has seductively replicated the surface effects of any number of Vermeer paintings, while enhancing them chromatically. At the same time he has adroitly conveyed the quietude and mysterious aura of the originals. He also explores their underlying structure. ...Painting Perspective constitutes just one encounter in Deem's long dialogue with the masterpieces of the long-dead Dutch master. In the process, he fashioned enduring pictures that beautifully bridge the past and present, creating a complex and endlessly fascinating amalgam of the quintessence of Vermeer's achievements and his own postmodern aesthetic concerns. (Wayne Franits, Vermeer, Phaidon Press, 2015. 314 - 316).
A Present Absence
… But all memory is a struggle against time.
Nowhere is this lost struggle more plaintive than in the realm of nostalgia, which validates the loss as a sort of moral victory. George Deem, in his recent exhibit called "Vermeer Extended" (at Pavel Zoubok Gallery New York, March 21 -- April 20, 2002), creates a plainly nostalgic approach to the paintings of Vermeer. He paints versions of Vermeer, but not in the usual, and by now superficial, postmodern sense of "quoting" or "appropriating" the Dutch master. Rather, he skillfully executes a Vermeer, but without the people in those lush, redolent interiors, as in An Allegory of Faith (2000) or he shows what would be read as a "detail" of a Vermeer masterpiece, as in Woman with a Water Pitcher (2002), as if resting comfortably on the page of an art history textbook. In a sense he is creating what I would call a temporal collage. Rather than attacking the picture plane and its flatness, as Picasso and Braque were said to have done in their papier collés of 1912, Deem creates a temporal rearrangement. Where the founders of cubism used commercially manufactured wallpaper in newly spatialized combinations with other graphic material to open up the semantic code of the represented image, Deem uses our memory of the "true" Vermeer as a present absence to qualify what we are seeing. But as with the well known use of modernist collage, the irony cuts both ways. We "see" a Vermeer that is not there, and we see a Vermeer-like effect that is altogether there. Deem's great technical skill -- which he himself mocks or self-criticizes by painting in test patches of uneven, roughly executed borders -- allows for something like a negative dialectic. If Deem can in fact paint like Vermeer, and the memory activated by such skill is fully estheticized, then why should we accept the usual sense of "Time's arrow," the belief that art history, like the larger history on which it is often parasitical, must be ineluctably one dimensional and future oriented?
… In what we can call "temporal collage" (as opposed to the spatial variety), we see two differently temporalized images. The historical context of one image, or its partial representation, is being juxtaposed against another historical moment, or against the "now" of the painting. … In the "now" of the painting that uses temporal collage we experience a framework that appears folded against itself, or is like two facing mirrors. The original Vermeer, or rather our memory of it, is what gives the Deem work its temporal definition as an echo of recovered memory, even as it reasserts the historicity of the Vermeer, which our recollection has presented to us less as an historical object than as a memory that is both willfully invoked and involuntary. Collage, by some accounts the most distinctive of all the strategies of modernism, is here extended into the temporal dimension. This is not simply a case of Deem taking up "raw material for sophisticated horseplay," as one critic put it, but rather a working out of the negative dialectics of history by an ironic use of collage. History, like memory, is a losing struggle, and sometimes our only victories over it come from our ironic restatement of it. (Charles Molesworth, "How To Live in an Image World: The Strategies of Memory," Salmagundi: A Quarterly of the Humanities and Social Sciences (Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, New York, Summer-Fall 2003).
Seeing Anew
(In) Vermeer's Easel (1999) the emphasis placed on the chair, positioned for the viewer's entrance, the person who sees the painting, articulates (the) new role to be played by the post-modern artist who, in effect, becomes the spectator through his/her creative act of duplication. The empty easel looks towards the very picture in which it is situated for its new occupant, towards the very picture in which it stands; Deem's re-envisioning of Vermeer's masterpiece is the new picture. The empty chairs, then, might be read as symbols of seeing anew, and their accentuated presence juntaposed with the empty easel in Deem's Vermeer's Easel might be interpreted as an allegory of seeing as opposed to painting or, perhaps more precisely, as an allegory of seeing that leads to painting. (Seema Srivastava, "Deem's Vermeers: A Post-Modern Allegory of Seeing?" working paper presented in Professor Robert Rosenblum's graduate seminar Neo-Historicism in Late Twentieth-Century Art at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, December 18, 2001)
Vermeer's Chair
(In George Deem's Vermeer's Chair of 1994) taking as his point of departure several Vermeers, among them Young Woman with Pearl Necklace (c. 1664), the artist creates a new "Vermeer" while staying as close as possible to the original's style, painting technique, and color harmony. There is a subtle irony in Vermeer's Chair in the way that this chair is inaccessibly placed to the left, in the corner of a spare Vermeerian interior that to the right appears to come forward toward the beholder, and then gradually dissolves into the abstract self-evidence of the canvas. While thus visualizing the difficulty of understanding Vermeer's places he also suggests that as painter, that is, in the process of painting, he can temporarily hold his place in a Vermeer. Perhaps more than any other of Deem's many "Vermeers," Vermeer's Chair, in its simplicity, pays homage to the seventeenth-century painter. (Christiane Hertel. Vermeer: Reception and Interpretation, New York, Cambridge University Press, 1996).
Quoting Caravaggio
As the allegorical work (School of Caravaggio, 1984) by George Deem suggests, neatness, purity, and perfect painting can only lead to excess, an excess that transforms a representation of excess into an excess of representation, a baroque realism into a postmodern culture of simulacrum, a baroque historicism into a postmodern metahistory. This image is baroque not just in what it refers to but in its querying of period delimitation, in its combative historicism.
… this painting …fragments Caravaggio's work into bits of representation, which are in turn isolated, enshrined, into individual masterpieces, yet related through spatial, erotic, and hostile emulations. Thus, the background, the old Saint Jerome on the left, mirrors what is perhaps the most attractive young male body in the history of Western painting. From close to the picture plane on the (left), diagonally across the room to the child who has witnessed Saint Matthew's martyrdom, a more promising exchange is going on. But the most unsettling students in this school are in the middle ground: the pair of wrestlers in the air. Quoting various struggles between heavenly and earthly Amors, their ambiguous status between sculpture and painting, between inside and outside, between war and love, may well be what the elegant Narcissus sees when he mirrors himself to death.
The preposterous history proposed here is not simply a postmodern act of quoting the past. It is from the historical Baroque -- but recycled for today -- that this principle of quotation is quoted in the first place. If taken not as an academic but as an anthropological case, the attempts to enshrine the "Baroque" as a historically delimited period must be seen, in addition, as a violent oppression that turns mirrors out of balance and knocks over chairs, or worse (George Deem, Italian Vermeer (Caravaggio), 1977). Attempts to make it universal, alternating with Classicism or not, just because "it happens" again today, are equally violent, suppressing the fact that we, too, are in history. (Mieke Bal, Quoting Caravaggio: Contemporary Art, Preposterous History, The University of Chicago Press, 1999. 266, 267.)
Meta-art
A meta-artistic work can both show how another art work has been made and make yet another artistic work from that demonstration (p. 51). ... the act of art-making -- and even art history itself -- may become the subject of meta-artistic reflexivity as well as of new art works (p. 52). ... the parodist can create a new and meta-artistic work of art from an older piece that reflects on how the work of art has been made; showing "how" as well as "that" (p.75). Further cases, in which the term parody understood in its traditional ancient sense as a comic refunctioning of another work does not seem entirely applicable, include works about other works of art, or pastiches, in which neither criticism nor comedy is derived from the reproduction of the earlier art work. (One such example is provided by George Deem's "Vermeers", in which several different Vermeer figures are brought together in one work without obvious criticism of the master... but create a homage to Vermeer's oeuvre as a whole that demonstrates both respect and the awareness that Vermeer's time and style are now of the past rather than of the present (p.214)). (Margaret A. Rose, Pictorial Irony, Parody, and Pastiche: Comic interpictoriality in the arts of the 19th and 20th centuries, Aisthesis Verlag, 2011).
Old-Master Reruns
Deem is a painter of unusual skill. He executes luminous paintings, which, while they debunk, also honor the source, upended or not. He can be vastly impertinent to some adored works, omitting a chunk from a Vermeer, leaving one figure headless, and calling his copy "Three-Quarter Vermeer"; or repeating a Fragonard 16 times in subtly varying colors, giving each image a quarter-turn to the right (Multiple Fragonard, 1965). With his musical chairs on canvas, he pricks the cult of old-master worship, but he takes the famous works apart in a way that probes into the "reasons" for the paintings. ... In "Six Paragraphs," a Corot painting copied that many times, details vary, images expand and contract, trees and shadows vary in size. He seeks to "tell something about" the nature of each painting and the vogue it reflects. He tries to "bring forth the way things are already established," he says. "After all an 'a' is an 'a' no matter where it is or what it is doing; so is a Vermeer." (Sarah Lansdell, Courier-Journal Art Critic, "Old-Master Reruns at Merida," The Courier-Journal, Louisville, Kentucky, Sunday, May 1, 1966).
Vermeer in Dialogue
The dialogue George Deem has maintained with Johannes Vermeer over the last fifty years reflects in nearly every way that of a long and cherished friendship. Deep and probing, playful and reticent, ironic and profound, Deem's works demonstrate an artist engaging with Vermeer as one intellectual to another. The juxtaposition of elements from Vermeer's works with those by other artists, his extension of themes begun by Vermeer within new dynamics in time, and his melding of Vermeer's themes with diverse painterly idioms serve to reinforce ideas on the significance of Vermeer within the context of modernism. Vermeer has provided Deem with a recognizable and engaging cultural emblem of beauty and the means through which he has pursued his own objectives of refinement and perfection in the idiom of paint. (Marguerite Anne Glass, Vermeer in Dialogue: From Appropriation to Response, PhD dissertation, University of Maryland, 2003. 163). drum.lib.umd.edu/bitstream/1903/45/1/dissertation.pdf
Wit and Quiet Virtuosity
Postmodern before the term was invented, for the past 35 years George Deem has made art that involves the quotation of art-historical masterpieces. His is an art of wit and quiet virtuosity, presenting us with the familiar in an unfamiliar context. As Peter Frank observed in a 1984 catalogue, Deem's paintings are not copies of paintings, but paintings of paintings …Vermeer above all has been Deem's artistic father. … "Vermeer Interiors," Deem's most recent show, included nine compositions derived from the rooms in the master's paintings. The theme is stated by Seven Vermeer Corners, which depicts the backgrounds of seven of Vermeer's best-known compositions with their titles written underneath, each reproduction executed in the original's size. Unpeopled, the rooms float in separate spaces on the canvas, like specimens pinned to a board. The interstices show primed canvas and a messy welter of brushstrokes that recall the motions of brush cleaning.
Deem emphasizes the independent nature of his paintings by making changes to the originals. For example, the chair in the background of Vermeer's Geographer, which is cropped by the picture's edge in the original, is intact in Seven Vermeer Corners. On the other hand, Deem often leaves a portion of his painting incomplete, as in Vermeer's Lady Seated at Virginal, Lady Removed, where the upper right corner is unfinished.
Such a denial of illusionism is appropriate to what are, in essence, meditations on Vermeer. Deem's brushwork is also looser, a little more abstract as befits a state one step removed from the original, and, on occasion, he leaves ridges of paint around the edges as evidence of the hand (something Vermeer never would have done).
Without Deem's knowledge of Vermeer, the viewer may not see a significant difference between the two artists' work. In this regard, I think Deem's most successful paintings are those entirely without people. The scenes evoke the sensation of déjà vu, yet there is still the shock of the unexpected. The emptiness of the rooms creates a contemporary sense of alienation -- Vermeer meets Edward Hopper. (Reagan Upshaw, "George Deem at Nancy Hoffman," Art in America, July 2000)
Desks, Apples, Books
The work of the American painter George Deem has been devoted to quoting the masters he admires. He is well known for his various interpretations of famous paintings, particularly those of Vermeer, to which he has made more or less subtle changes that reflect his own ideas or impressions about the work he is reproducing over and above the actual scene it represents. He invites us to enter a maze of mirrors: the sensation that we feel when faced with his works is a reflection of the sensation Deem himself felt, faced with the work he is quoting. When speaking about the sensations and thoughts produced by painting -- so much more ambiguous and undisciplined than those produced, for example, by a written text -- the "differentiation phenomenon" or displacement of meaning of which Derrida has written is increased exponentially.
In 1993-1994, Deem organized a traveling exhibition in the United States. The paintings that made up that exhibition were then collected in his book, Art School. The works reflect and embody a sense of humor that is best described by a few examples: School of Rembrandt, 1989; School of De Chirico, 1989; The Fauve School, 1989.
One of the (perhaps essential) things that humor and learning have in common is that both of those somewhat ambivalent entities require intelligence. The satisfaction we feel when we manage to grasp some piece of knowledge and the pleasure we feel when surprised by an ingenious witticism share a common value: we discover a new way of viewing things. Deem's genius is to confront us with the two meanings of the word "school" and to use both meanings in paying tribute to the masters he admires. As Pablo Pineau noted, the great accomplishment of the modern school is to have made itself synonymous with education, so that when we hear someone speak on educational questions we immediately have an image of a teacher standing before a group of students seated at a row of desks. Even in such disparate fields as cooking or soccer, the most natural way to teach is to place the teacher in a classroom with his students seated before him, and for him to impart -- teach, indicate, instruct, point out, the word has many meanings -- his knowledge to them.
Although he may not have read Pablo Pineau, George Deem pays homage to the masterful teaching of the artists he admires by combining their works with rows of desks. Something particularly strange occurs in this mirror game when two, or even three, different moments in historical education are brought face to face. For example, see what happens when Deem decides to pay homage to Raphael. School of Athens, 1987.
Raphael’s fresco in the Vatican’s Stanza della Segnatura is the best known of a series of three frescos celebrating the foundations of Renaissance culture, of which the painter was one of the most brilliant exponents. To depict Plato’s Academy, which flourished in the Fourth Century BC, Raphael utilized Renaissance architecture and clothing, producing a scene more suitable to sixteenth-century Florence than to the Age of Pericles. Were it thought that the intent of the painter from Urbino was to create a historically accurate reconstruction, then the result is obviously an anachronism. However, such was not Raphael’s concern. He was paying homage to education itself, not to its history. And because his homage -- or, more accurately, his certainty that some knowledge is permanent and timeless – is effective, the anachronism becomes unimportant. Deem has added a row of desks to the scene, and the result is now the homage of a twentieth-century artist to a work of the sixteenth century which, in turn, pays tribute to teachers in the age of classic Greece. Or – put another way – we have an individual of the modern school showing his admiration for a Renaissance artist who, in the same spirit, once depicted a school of Fourth Century BC. And who knows? – given a few more centuries, we may need another depiction of the history of education to understand just what makes these desks, these books, the apples in this painting, seem so strange.
Pablo Colotta, Red Alfa Patre Manes, Thursday, February 9, 2006
http://redpatremanes.blogspot.com/2006/02/pupitres-manzanas-y-libros.html
Translated from Spanish by Richard Miller
How to Paint a Vermeer
Deem's interest in perfecting his Vermeer inspired compositions does not stop with the surface details or luminous effects of the master's work, but extends inward to the complicated structures lying beneath the surface of Vermeer's paintings that often go undetected by the naked eye. Following a method of design in use since the Renaissance, Deem utilizes a grid system of horizontal, vertical and diagonal lines onto which he organizes the elements from Vermeer's composition and builds up his colors.
Deem's painting entitled How to Paint a Vermeer (1981) explicitly demonstrates this working method used to create a reproduction of Vermeer's Young Woman with a Water Pitcher. …Six rectangular vignettes of equal size in two horizontal rows, one above the other, are organized by Deem on a single canvas surface. Moving from left to right first on the top row and then on the bottom, Deem demonstrates six consecutive stages of his painting's development from beginning to end. The framing and documentation of these stages are in a sense cinematic, calling to mind efforts to record photographically an artist's work in progress using either still or moving film. Here, however, instead of building up a single image, Deem begins each of the six vignettes in the same way, building up each "frame" to the right one step further than its counterpart to the left, and ending with a completed "replica" of Vermeer's painting in the lower right. The roughly painted surfaces seen in the margins surrounding the vignettes serve to remind the viewer of the medium with which a painter works and the way in which its potential is ultimately in the control of the artist.
Marguerite Anne Glass, Vermeer in Dialogue: From Appropriation to Response, PhD dissertation, University of Maryland, 2003. 150-51. http://drum.lib.umd.edu/bitstream/1903/45/1/dissertation.pdf
Altering Time
Douglas Messerli. greeninteger.blogspot.com/2008/09/altering-time.html
Note to File April 20, 2002
The essential quality of some artists is their elusiveness. The concealed inner meaning of George Deem's paintings (like Vermeer's) is perhaps that he is hidden so well within them as to escape detection altogether, which is how you know he's there. (Unknown source).