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Tim's Vermeer
You know, sometimes
when I'm laying in bed at night
trying to get to sleep,
all I can think about is this goal
You know, really, I'm gonna try
to paint a Vermeer.
And, at the face of it,
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
But no such documents have ever
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,
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
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
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.
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.
tracing the image of a live model
projected through a lens.
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'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
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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"Tim's Vermeer" Scripts.com. STANDS4 LLC, 2024. Web. 7 Sep. 2024. <https://www.scripts.com/script/tim's_vermeer_21918>.
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