Years ago, among other machinery beyond a chain-link fence, Critter noticed a Vermeer. It was the first time he associated the equipment with the painter. He imagined making his own series of relatively few Vermeers. For years this was a low priority, until he heard the sounds of a brush chipper on April 3, 2025. He looked out his kitchen window and saw an indeterminate, schoolbus-yellow machine. He then looked online and, with pleasure, noticed similarities between the machine outside and the image for Brush Chippers on Vermeer’s “Equipment” page. Pictured there was a quantity of equipment comparable to the number of paintings scholars attribute to Vermeer. From there, Critter’s Vermeers were delightedly developed.

Written and published in conjunction with the creation and exhibition of an homonymous group of paintings, Thirtyfour Or More Vermeers encourages a multifaceted reading of the paintings. First, their words are reformatted to make explicit their poetic quality. Then, the authenticity of three of the paintings is questioned. Finally, each painting is reproduced in the form of a late-eighties graphic-art mock-up, complete with color breakdowns for their digital counterparts. It was these digital counterparts that were projected onto Tyvek to aid the creation of the paintings.