Tim's Vermeer

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You know, sometimes

when I'm laying in bed 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'm gonna try

to paint a Vermeer.

And, at the face of it,

that seems almost impossible.

And I don't know if I could do it.

You know, it'll be pretty

remarkable if I can,

because I'm not a painter.

The Vermeer he's 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

artist's 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's no documentation that he did this,

it's possible 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'm a computer graphics guy,

and we use technology

to make a realistic, beautiful image,

and it's possible that's exactly

what Vermeer was doing.

Tim Jenison is not a painter,

he's an inventor.

He's always had a talent for figuring out

how things work.

When Tim was growing up in Iowa,

he got a broken player piano,

repaired it, and taught himself

to play swing music

by slowing down the piano rolls

so he could follow Fats Waller's fingers.

Tim played keyboards 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 built 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 LightWave,

a program for rendering 3D images,

which won an Emmy for his company,

NewTek, in 2003.

Tim's now based in San Antonio, Texas,

and his company produces the TriCaster,

used in broadcast, web,

and live performance.

All this has given Tim the money

and free time to make things like this,

Frankie, his lip-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 stays at exactly the same distance

under the light.

And this.

Here's the pipe organ Tim put together

from four different churches.

Once I got started,

you have to have more pipes,

because it's never quite enough,

so I've got three pipe organs here,

plus an electronic organ

that I'm using for the keyboard.

Tim and I have been friends

for a really long time.

If there was an artist,

he would draw it, what you see...

We've 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.

This is 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 book, Secret Knowledge.

Hockney 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 no 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 in 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 hole,

and you can change

the size of the image on the wall

by changing the curvature

and position of the lens.

Here's David Hockney on a TV special.

He's inside a camera obscura,

tracing the image of a live model

projected through a lens.

Hockney was mostly focused on

how a painter could have traced images

through a lens.

To me, what was most striking

about the Vermeers, as a video guy,

I'm 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 a camera obscura

got the idea that they could take that

projected image and somehow paint on it.

Well, I've 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 hand, here's a perfect match.

The colour that matches

the projected colour just right.

The only colour that'll

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're really talking about

is this verisimilitude that Vermeer has,

that it just pops.

You see it from across the room

and it looks like a slide,

it looks like a colour slide of Kodachrome.

Seeing the Vermeers in person

was a revelation.

It reinforced to me that

I was on the right track.

That what I was seeing was an accurate

representation of the colour in that room.

I just had a hunch that there must be a way

to actually get the colours accurate,

with mechanical means.

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