Watch Tim s Vermeer Online Megavideo

Watch Tim s Vermeer Online Megavideo

Watching Tim's Vermeer, I was sort of reminded of a pair of art documentaries that turn ideas about artists and creation on their ear. There's My Kid Could Paint That, a doc about a purported child prodigy named Marla Olmstead, and there's Who the*$#% Is Jackson Pollock, a doc about a woman who unwittingly buys a purported Jackson Pollock from a thrift shop. The targets of both these films are the art world and certain sacred cows of the art world. Or at least I was reminded of those films at first. With Tim's Vermeer, Penn & Teller explore the bizarre obsession of Tim Jenison, an inventor who believes he's figured out how Johannes Vermeer was able to paint with such uncanny beauty. Using this technique, he tries to recreate Vermeer's The Music Lesson from life, from scratch. Thing is, Tim is not an artist, but there are lines between science, innovation, and fine art that blur. I think Tim's Vermeer is a celebration of art and obsession, and it implicitly makes the case that without the latter, the former isn't possible. Meanwhile, in San Antonio, Texas, Tim Jenison knew nothing of the brouhaha. Jenison, now 58, is the founder of NewTek, where he has made a fortune inventing hardware and software for video production and post-production. He is a nonstop tinkerer in the rest of his life as well, building giant model airplanes and battle robots, and learning to fly helicopters. Curious, careful, soft-spoken, and comfortably schlumpy, he comes across more as a neighborhood professor you might see at Home Depot than as a guy who owns his own jet. But in 2002, one of his daughters, then a student at the Rhode Island School of Design, recommended he read Secret Knowledge. “And Steadman,” Jenison says, “really got me thinking hard.

” As a guy who has spent his whole career reproducing and manipulating visual images, and contemplating the deep nuts and bolts of how our eyes see differently than cameras do, Jenison had a strong hunch that Hockney and Steadman were right. However, the Hockney-Steadman theories were just that—theories, experimentally undemonstrated. As the nay-saying historian James Elkins (of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago) observed in 2001, “the optical procedures posited in Hockney’s book are all radically undertested,” and “no one, including myself, knows what it is really like to get inside a camera obscura”—a lens projecting a perfect image of one side of a room onto a surface equidistant on the other side—“and make a painting.” Jenison decided to construct a version of a device that Vermeer himself could have built and used. And since he had no training or experience as an artist whatsoever, he figured he was the ideal beta user of whatever he rigged up. He was in no rush. His R&D period lasted five years. He went to the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. “Looking at their Vermeers,” he says, “I had an epiphany”—the first of several. “The photographic tone is what jumped out at me. Why was Vermeer so realistic? Because he got the values right,” meaning the color values. “Vermeer got it right in ways that the eye couldn’t see. It looked to me like Vermeer was painting in a way that was impossible. I jumped into studying art.” He traveled to Delft again and again, scouting the places where Vermeer had painted. He learned to read Dutch. He paid for translations of old Latin texts on optics and art. Much later, he did a computer analysis of a high-resolution scan of a Vermeer interior, and discovered “an exponential relationship in the light on the white wall.” The brightness of any surface becomes exponentially less bright the farther it is from a light source—but the unaided human eye doesn’t register that.

 According to Jenison, the painting he digitally deconstructed shows just such a diminution from light to dark. But still, exactly how did Vermeer do it? One day, in the bathtub, Jenison had a eureka moment: a mirror. If the lens focused its image onto a small, angled mirror, and the mirror was placed just between the painter’s eye and the canvas, by glancing back and forth he could copy that bit of image until the color and tone precisely matched the reflected bit of reality. Five years ago, Jenison tried it out on the kitchen table. He took a black-and-white photograph and mounted it upside down, since a lens would project an image upside down. He put a round two-inch mirror on a stand between the photo and his painting surface. He immediately found that “when the color is the same, the mirror edge disappears,” and you’re through with that bit. Five hours later, he had painted a perfect duplicate of the photo, an astounding proof of concept by someone who can’t draw and had never painted a thing. Then he used his mirror trick to copy a color photo. Again, perfect. “I couldn’t believe my eyes,” he says. But while that was all well and good, it wasn’t remotely Vermeerian.