In my usual Wikipedia rabbit hole journey, I came across some lovely paintings the other day. I ended up going through the page of Johannes Vermeer, admiring a bunch of his works. Consider my surprise when I scrolled by a familiar painting, The Girl with the Pearl Earring. Although the artist’s name didn’t ring a bell at first, that painting is famous enough that it stopped me in my tracks. Go figure, he’s got all these detailed slice-of-life paintings that give a strong sense of what life was like for an average, middle class, Dutch person in the mid-1600s, and yet the only work of his I’d seen before was that one.
I guess it’s kinda like how some musicians can put out multiple albums, yet be forever known as a “one hit wonder” because only one of their songs “made it big.”
I know it’s kinda off topic, but what I find even weirder are bands that are “one hit wonders” in one country, but have like 10 hits and a long career in another country.
They’ll have a whole wikipedia article of awards they’ve won you’ve never heard of, and tours they went on, and you’re like “they wrote more than one song!?”
Wanna have a ton of fun? Penn Jillette, of Penn & Teller, has a documentary following a guy who sets out in an adventure to prove that Vermeer used a primitive form of camera osbcura to make his paintings so realistic by making a painting himself in the theorized way. It’s called Tim’s Vermeer and it is incredibly fascinating as an insight into the obsession that Vermeer’s work still creates today.
In my usual Wikipedia rabbit hole journey, I came across some lovely paintings the other day. I ended up going through the page of Johannes Vermeer, admiring a bunch of his works. Consider my surprise when I scrolled by a familiar painting, The Girl with the Pearl Earring. Although the artist’s name didn’t ring a bell at first, that painting is famous enough that it stopped me in my tracks. Go figure, he’s got all these detailed slice-of-life paintings that give a strong sense of what life was like for an average, middle class, Dutch person in the mid-1600s, and yet the only work of his I’d seen before was that one.
I guess it’s kinda like how some musicians can put out multiple albums, yet be forever known as a “one hit wonder” because only one of their songs “made it big.”
I know it’s kinda off topic, but what I find even weirder are bands that are “one hit wonders” in one country, but have like 10 hits and a long career in another country.
They’ll have a whole wikipedia article of awards they’ve won you’ve never heard of, and tours they went on, and you’re like “they wrote more than one song!?”
And this is why I love Todd in the Shadows’s One Hit Wonderland.
a-ha and their eleven studio albums have entered the chat
Wanna have a ton of fun? Penn Jillette, of Penn & Teller, has a documentary following a guy who sets out in an adventure to prove that Vermeer used a primitive form of camera osbcura to make his paintings so realistic by making a painting himself in the theorized way. It’s called Tim’s Vermeer and it is incredibly fascinating as an insight into the obsession that Vermeer’s work still creates today.