Film: Tim's Vermeer In the previous chapter we studied how painters used techniques such as perspective to deploy an appearance of a three dimensional space into a flat canvas surface. Master painters

Tim’s Vermerr

A Penn & Teller film produce by penn jillette

You know sometimes when I am laying in ben at night trying to get to sleep, all I can think about is this goal of trying to paint a Vermeer. You know, really, I am going to try to paint a Vermeer. And, at the face of it, that seems almost impossible. And I do – I don’t know if I could do it. You know, it will be pretty remarkable if I can, because I am not a painter. T

The Vermeer he is talking about is Johannes Vermeer, the Dutch artist from the 1600s. Some consider him the greatest painter of all time. When you look at a Vermeer, it seems like more than paint on canvas. It seems to glow like the image on a movie screen. That magical quality has mystified the world for 350 years. How did Vermeer do it? Dutch artists typically learnt by apprenticeship and they kept written records to prove their training. But no such documents have ever been found about Vermeer. And strangely, when you X-ray these intricate images, you don’t find the usual artists sketches underneath. It’s as if Vermeer were some unfathomable genius who could just walk up to a Canvas and magically paint with light. It’s possible that Vermeer was using technology to make these beautiful paintings. If he did that, and, of course, there is no documentation that he did this. It’s possible that he could paint some pretty remarkable pictures without a lot of training. It’s possible that he was more of an experimenter, more of a tinkerer, more of a geek. And, in that way, I feel a kinship with him because I am a computer graphics guy, and we use technology to make a realistic, beautiful image. And it is possible that is exactly what Vermeer was doing. Tim Jenison is not a painter, he is an inventor, he is always had a talent for figuring out how things work. When Tim was growing up in lowa, he got broken player piano, repaired it, and taught himself to play swing music by slowing down the piano rolls so he could fellow fats Waller’s fingers. Tim played keyboard in a rock band for a couple of years and taught himself to fix anything electronic that broke. The amazing wizard! He got married, had a family, and build a business repairing pinball machines and video games. Then, around 1990, he invented a way to turn personal computers into TV studios for live broadcasting. He called it the video toaster, and it won him an Emmy. That led him to other amazing achievements like light wave, a program for rendering 3d images, which won an Emmy for his company, new tek, in 2003. Tim’s now based in San Antonio, Texas, and his company produces the Tricaster, Used in broadcast, wed, and live performance. All this has given Tim the manly and free time to make things like this, Frankie, his up- syncing duck. A plane made entirely of stuff from a home improvement store. It’s an electric moth. His electric moth, as you raise the light, it comes up off the floor, and it stage at exactly the same distance under the light, And This.

Here is the pipe organ Tim put together from four different churches. Once I got started, you have to have more pipes, because it is never quite enough, so I have got these pipe organs here, plus an electronic organ that Pm using for the keyboard. Tim and I have been friend for a really long time. If there was an artist, he drawn it, what you see---- we have cried together at space shuttle launches. We flew his Learjet down to Cabo San Lucas to see the total eclipse of the sun, so, the devil’s in there, Right. Right. This Penn, the last day he was able to see before he lost god’s most precious gift looking at the eclipse. Tim’s been weightless in an astronaut- training plane and he arranged for me to try it, too. I vomited into my own hair. Tim was not and is not a painter. So I didn’t know he had this whole little sub-obsession with, Vermeer, Tim’s Vermeer project started 11 years back, in 2002, when his daughter gave him a copy of David Hockney’s secret knowledge. Hackney wrote that when pictures started to look less like this, and more like this, that was because artists had found new tools to help them. In 17th – century Holland, high quality lenses and mirrors were in use everywhere. Telescopes were all the rage and science hobbyists were experimenting with ways to project live images. Hockney challenged conventional wisdom by suggesting that when artists of Vermeer’s day began to paint more accurately, they were longer using just their eyes and their imaginations. They were secretly getting help from optical machines, like the camera obscura. Camera obscura is Latin for “dark room”. Build a box, any size. Could be the size of a shoebox, but let’s make this one big enough to stand inside. It’s a dark room. Drill a little hole on one side of the box and you see something surprising. The image of whatever is outside the box, in the light, is projected on the wall opposite the hole, only it’s upside down and backwards. You can make the image brighter and clearer by putting a lens in the holes and you can change the size of the image on the wall by changing the curvature and passion of the lens. Here’s David Hockney on a TV special. He is inside a camera obscura, tracing the image of a live model projected through a lens. Hockney was mostly focused on how a painter could traced images through a lens. To me what was most striking about the Vermeer’s, as a video guy, I am looking at this image, and I see a video signal. I see something that looks like it came out of a video camera. So I thought about how a painter could actually copy that. Now, most people that have played with acamera obscura got the idea that they could take that projected image and somehow paint on it. Well, I have tried that and a lot of people have tried it, It’s impossible. What happens is it actually fights you, it works against you, it’s worse than nothing at all. Painting on a projection just doesn’t work. Here’s a blue that matches very closely the blue in the projection. Imagine this is wet paint. When you put it into the projection, it looks way too dark. On the other hands, here is a perfect match. The color that matches the projection color just right. The only color that will ever do that is white. Tim went around the world studying Vermeer.

They called it “painting with light. “ Vermeer “painted with light. ‘ You can’t paint with light, you have to paint with paint. And so what they are really talking about is this verisimilitude that Vermeer has, that it’s just pops. You see it from across the room and it looks like, a slide, it looks like a color slide of Kodachrome. Seeing the Vermeer’s in person was a revelation. It reinforced to me that I was on the right track that what I was seeing was an accurate presentation of the color in that room. I just had a hunch that there must be a way to actually get the colors accurate, with mechanical means. Some way you could do that in the 17th century. I remember just having this vague idea of comparing two color with a mirror, and it didn’t go any farther that for a long time setting in bathtub, you know, that’s I guess where you have your eureka moments, but I don’t know, there’s something about bath water, you know, it’s just very very relaxing. And I was just picturing that mirror hanging there in space, and I pictured what I would see, and there it was. And so I grabbed a piece of paper, being careful not to get it wet, made a sketch, and that was where I realized Vermeer cold have used mirror to paint those paintings. To test this I propped up a high school photograph of my father- in law on the table. I put a piece of Masonite down here to paint on. I set a small at a 45- degree angle. And for the first time in my life, I did just what Vermeer may have done. I picked up some oil paints and a brush. In Vermeer’s camera this would be a projection, a lens is projecting this image. But to show the actual mirror paining process, we are using a photograph here. You can see that there’s a reflection, and then there is my canvas down here. And right at the edge of the mirror, I can see both things at once. I am just going to apply paint and either darken or lighten the paint until it’s the same exact color. And at that point, when it’s exactly the same color, the edge of the mirror will disappear. All right, and I am an idiot at this, I have done this process exactly twice in my life before. What I am doing is I am moving my head up and down so that I can see first the original and then my Canvas.

I am looking at both things at the same time, Right on the forehead, you can see that they match, because you can’t really see the edge of the mirror. That is your clue that you have matched the paint exactly. It is not subjective, it’s objective. I am a human piece of human photographic film at that point. What you are doing here is you are essentially blending? Yeah, I am on the surface. You aren’t tracing any lines because there are no lines- yeah, that’s a characteristic of the Vermeer’s that makes them unusual, is that there weren’t lines, and there weren’t any lines blobs underneath the paint either. It looks like there is these blobs that are emerging into picture. It don’t look like, the order you are doing stuff in is not, and it’s not being done mentally. No, its ------ and that’s what’s so nutty about it- you know, if I was better at this< it may be more systematic, I may evolve into doing it more systematically, but no matter what I have tried, if I just spend enough time comparing the mirror to the canvas and stetting the paint around, it ends up looking like a photograph. And this was the result of Tim’s experiment, it took him five hours. Not bad for a first oil painting the father- in –law picture was proof enough in my mind that Vermeer probably did this. However, my father in-law doesn’t look like a 17th- century, Dutch woman, so I don’t think it would be very convincing evidence for a lot of people. So, I thought the best way would be to really do a Vermeer. I had the suspicion that it was exactly the same thing. If I could do the father- in-law, I could paint a Vermeer. It seemed to me the most powerful demonstration of the idea. The reason I chose the music lesson is probably because, of all the paintings, I think the music lesson is a great little laboratory, because it’s so complete and self-contained. You know where the windows are, you know how big the window are, you can reconstruct the harpsichord independent of the painting, the Spanish chair, the viola da gamba, the rug, all these things could be procured, and their appearance is going to be what it is, independent of Vermeer waiting to happen.

Paintings are documents, they contain the story of their own creation. Every brushstroke, every layer of color, every shadow represents another piece of information. To the trained eye, a painting can be read as accurately as any written text. And you don’t need a trained eye to see that Vermeer’s look different from his contemporaries. They look video images. He painted the way a camera sees. Ever since photography was invented, people have been noticing optical thing about Vermeer, on the Girl with the red hat, there is this lion’s head in the foreground that’s fuzzy. Your aye naturally refocuses on whatever you are looking at, so something in the foreground is not going to appear to your eye as out of focus. But it could be out of focus if the image was projected with a lens. The so – called pointillist, these little, circle of paint, look similar to what you get in a bed lens. You look at the back of her jacket and there is a faint blue line. And that looks a lot like chromatic aberration which is what happens in a crude lens. The edge of objects can develop this rainbow fringes around them. This fall off light from the window to the opposite corner is something that an artist really cannot see the way a camera sees it. It’s impossible to see it. But Vermeer painted it the way a camera sees it. Is it possible that some people can see absolute brightness, and some people- most people, can’t? You know, the way a musician might have perfect pitch? You know, that is a question for a doctor. I am Colin Blakemore, I am a professor at oxford. Or a scientist that specialized in human vision and I have spent most of my career studying vision and the functions of the brain. Is Vermeer, maybe some sort of a savant that’s different from the rest of the human race! What if someone said, “Maybe there is a savant who is so smart, that he could figure that out.” Well. He is not smart. I mean, he’d have to have a very strange retina. Our retinas are made the way they are made. The retina is an outgrowth of the brain. It’s a very complicated structure in terms of its nervous organization. The signals go through a complicated network, several layers of different types of nerve cells, before they finally get back to the last cells in the chain whose fibers make up the optic nerve. The optic nerve has limited bandwidth, so the signals have to be compressed. One thing we lose in that compression is the ability to record absolute brightness the way a light meter can. When we see two values side by side, it’s easy to compare them. But when we split them, that ability goes ways. There just ism not any mechanism in the human nervous system to turn the eye into a light mater. And this is a disaster if you really want to know about the appearance of the scene because you just can’t do it with your brain. Look at the light on the back wall of the music lesson. Every subtlety of brightness is recorded with absolute photographic precision. The unaided human eye is not equipped to that. But if Vermeer used something like Tim’s device, the painting becomes possible. The queen of England owns Vermeer’s music lesson.

When Tim got back to San Antonio, he was in trouble when he looked directly at virginals, he could see the intricate pattern of inter locking seahorse that Vermeer painted. When he looked at the projection in his camera obscura, all those delicate little lines were too fuzzy and dim to paint. It was a deal= killer. I had visions of a failed experiment. Tim knew here was something he was missing. He experimented with increasingly complex arrangements of lenses and mirrors. But nothing worked. Them Tim had an inspiration. He held a mirror against the wall where the image was being projected. Now he could see a small circle of the room sharp and clear and hundreds of times brighter. By tilting the mirror around, he could see any part of the room he needed to paint. Then he realized if he just replaced the flat mirror with a concave mirror, like a shaving mirror, he could make the bright circle much larger, so Tim said, I realized that if I could have an image that bright, I didn’t have to have this darkroom, I could paint in daylight, which is a huge, huge breakthrough. Tim started in the dark room. But the room is gone. The back wall is a concave mirror. All that’s left of the traditional camera obscura is the lens. Tim had invented a new optical instrument or, perhaps, rediscovered a lost one. In it, he could see well enough to attempt Vermeer’s level of detail. He had his room. He had his machine. He was now ready to paint. Tim said I am not trying to make this look like a Vermeer, but it really looks like a Vermeer. I was cleaning up. And getting ready to put my palette away, ah, call it a day’s work, and I liked up at the monitor. I thought, oh, man, that, you know, that camera got pointed in the wrong direction, it’s pointed at the room. How did that happen? And that’s the thought that went through my head for just a couple milliseconds before I realized, “no, I am looking at the painting.’ And it was just kind of like you know, this, project is a lot like watching painting dry. I can paint the costumes by putting them on mannequins. But to paint faces and hands, I needed to use people. I do everything I can to help them hold still. It sort of works. My daughter Claire is home for a month from college. And it’s time to paint the girl, so I put two and two together, and used, Clair. Her, two sister, are also in town, Lure and Natalie. So they worked on fitting the costume and, doing her hair so that it looks like the girl in the picture.

When they got all that on, she was a dead ringer for the little Dutch girl. With that completed, we put her in the head clamp, and positioned her just right. 47 days few students have ever been happier to go back to school. I may repaint that. Excuse me a second. The winds trying to blow my shade down. Fucker! Piece of shit. We are going to have to go to plan B here. The frame that has my window, and my shades and stuff, it came loose and it fell over and I think everything’s okay. All right I tend to build things until they are just barely good enough. And sometimes that envelope gets exceeded. So if anything falls askew. Your painting’s in no danger, is that correct? Tim reply oh no, I wouldn’t say that. Okay. But, you know, can always start over. 49 days gone. Another interesting thing happened. What I noticed while I was looking at this, I can see the straight lines of the seashore there, and I can see the straight lines that I have ruled already on the canvas, the frame work of the virginals. All those are perfecting straight lines because I laid them out with a straight edge before I painted them. Well, when 1-1 I am trying to align this very close now, within a tiny fraction, I can see that this straight line isn’t quite straight in the reflection. It’s ever so slightly cured. Probably not enough to throw me off now that I am aware of it, but I had just literally painted that seashore Pattern, it would have ended up curved like this. And, so I don’t know why, but I went over and I picked up the Vermeer print. And I go, ‘well, obviously, Vermeer had no trouble painting those lines straight. And then, I had the painting sideways like this and I am looking down these straight lines. And there is something really crazy about this. The top and the bottom of the virginals are absolutely straight because when I look at it down her at an angle, I can see that it’s a straight line. The seashore motifs curved.

It goes like this. You can’t really tell until you look at it right down these lines, but there is a curvature in there. And there’s really no logical explanation for that unless he was using something like this. Tim calls that bend in the seahorse pattern the seahorse smile.’ It’s a flaw in Vermeer’s painting. A mistake that nobody noticed for 350 years, and the Tim almost made the same mistake. Tim is not looking for something that will duplicate Vermeer’s mistake. You know, he doesn’t know Vermeer’s mistake is there. That’s either a Tim’s machine, or something very much like Tim’s machine to do his painting. Tim said, as Hockney said, paintings are documents and here is a little bit of evidence. 52 days gone. Tim said today I painted the seahorse motif. It was a lot of work. I couldn’t really sit here for more than 15, 2o minutes at a time. Your back just gets extremely tense. I tried, to sit in the most reset, relaxed at the most position I could find, which is like this. It’s just really nerve- wracking, meticulous, demanding work. I am not looking forward to doing the rest of the instrument, but at least I know its double. 53 days gone. What I painted today is maybe, I expect will turn out to be the hardest of the painting, physically, to do. 55 days gone. Well yeah this is going to be short because it’s about 40o in her. So, Karl and I came in her this morning, and looked at each other, like. ‘No’ you know, it’s really cold in here, so I go,” wait, I have got this heater in the garage that I never assemble. I got this for Christmas a few years ago. It’s one of those patio heaters. So Karl said, Hey, I will put it together. Let’s go get it,” So we went and get it, and put it together, it’s over there. And fired it up and it worked great. It’s nice and toasty, you know?

And I said- Karl was sitting over there with his computer, and said, hey, look up on there to, you know, see if it’s safe to use these indoors. And Karl looks up and says, “Yeah, you know it says here it’s absolutely not safe to use indoors. And I said. Oaky. Well, let’s just run it and we will, you know, be careful, okay? So if we notice any symptoms of carbon monoxide poisoning, you know, we will shut it off. So Tim start painting, and he said I actually painted an elephant on the music lesson. I don’t know why I put it there, but it seemed like a good idea at the time. And Karl actually, he put his head down, and said, “I need a nap. I said, what did you say? Tim said lest leave right now. Let’s shut thing off and go get lunch. And on the way to lunch, driving to lunch, you know, everything sort of cleared up again, you know we were in a fog. So anyway, that was a bad idea. 69 days gone. It was kind of a weird day. I got, come in and started painting this lower Cashion, and sort of a wave of revulsion swept over me. I just wanted to do anything in the world but sit here and paint for some reason. I don’t know, just one of those things. But I am pretty much ready for this painting to be finished. If we weren’t making a film, I would have quit? Yeah, I definitely would, yeah, I would find something else to do right now. 86 days gone. I thought that the rug would be a little more free form painting. But this rug is close enough to the optical equipment here that I can clearly see all those little stitches. And since I can see that, and since my rule is “paint what see in the mirror, if to sort, make like the harpsichord here and go for the detail. 130 days gone. Settings up lights. And, it show. Today is the, Denouement, of sorts. The varnish job. For the last several months I have been promising myself that all would have be better when the varnish went on because as the paint dries, it gets light, it gets chalky, it desaturates. Tim have been very anxious to do this. And he went along slowing with a small brush and finally he said I just, you know, grabbed a giant brush, sloshed it in the varnish and just started going to town. And everywhere I touch was magic said Tim. He said it’s pretty astounding. Well, you know, Today, Today’s the day I have been waiting for. It’s, I am sorry said Tim and he was crying, said I can’t believe that it’s finished.