Tim's Vermeer Page #2

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Some way you could do that

in the 17th century.

I remember just having this vague idea

of comparing two colours with a mirror,

and it didn't go any farther than that

for a long time.

Sitting in the bathtub,

you know, that's I guess where you have

your eureka moments,

but, I don't know,

there's something about bath water...

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 realised

Vermeer could have used a 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 mirror 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 painting process,

we're using a photograph here.

You can see that there's a reflection,

and then there's my canvas down here.

And right at the edge of the mirror,

I can see both things at once.

I'm just going to apply paint

and either darken or lighten the paint

until it's the same exact colour.

And at that point,

when it's exactly the same colour,

the edge of the mirror will disappear.

All right, and I'm an idiot at this,

I have done this process

exactly twice in my life before.

What I'm doing is

I'm moving my head up and down

so that I can see first the original

and then my canvas.

I'm 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's, that's your clue that

you've matched the paint exactly.

It's not subjective, it's objective.

I'm a piece of human photographic film

at that point.

What you're doing here

is you're essentially blending?

Yep, I am either darkening or lightening

the paint that's already on the surface.

You aren't tracing any lines,

'cause there are no lines.

Yeah, that's a characteristic of the

Vermeers that makes them unusual,

is that there weren't lines,

and there weren't any lines

drawn underneath the paint either.

It looks like there's these blobs

that are emerging into a picture.

It doesn't look like...

The order you're doing stuff in is not a...

It's not being done mentally.

No, it's...

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've tried,

if I just spend enough time

comparing the mirror to the canvas

and stirring 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 so self-contained.

You know where the windows are,

you know how big the windows 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 gonna be what it

is, independent of Vermeer's painting.

It's a little scientific experiment

waiting to happen.

Before Tim went to all that trouble,

we thought he should run

his idea by a working artist.

So we called up our friend,

Los Angeles-based painter

and entertainer, Martin Mull,

and asked him to meet Tim

at a studio in Las Vegas and see his gizmo.

Oh, my God.

Holy cow.

Took me about half an hour

to learn how to operate a paintbrush.

Good for you, it took me 40 years.

Well, and the beauty of this technique

is that you can make mistakes

and see what you did wrong instantly

and try to fix it.

This is astounding.

So this is a camera obscura,

typical of the type

that could be found in the 1600's.

This type of camera obscura

is called a "box camera obscura".

It generally had a ground glass like this.

It has the ability to refocus

by moving the lens in and out.

The general consensus of people

that believe Vermeer used optics

was that he may have looked at that image

and been inspired by it.

Yeah.

And that's the end of the story.

So now that we know there's a way

to copy the colours exactly,

I'm proposing an alternate history

of Vermeer.

Okay.

His father's an art dealer,

he knows something about art,

he wants to make a painting.

He looks at this image...

Okay.

There's my daughter, Natalie.

What if Vermeer took the camera,

turned it sideways, and now it's vertical,

- like my father-in-law picture.

- Okay.

He takes his canvas,

and, the secret ingredient,

the mirror.

He positions the mirror here.

Which corrects the inversion?

- Yeah, it brings it back...

- And everything...

And there it is! Clear as can be.

So if he's in his living room,

he puts up some curtains,

controls the light,

and now picks up his brush

and starts to paint.

My guess is that the Girl with the Red Hat

is that first painting.

- Wow.

- It's painted over the top of another painting.

We can x-ray it and see that

there's something else underneath,

so maybe this was just

a throwaway experiment.

So I understand, Tim,

that when you go back to Texas,

you're going to construct a replica

of the exact room where Vermeer painted?

Yeah.

And you're going

to do a painting in his stead,

am I right?

Yep.

Many of Vermeer's paintings appear

to have been painted in the same room,

likely the north-facing room

on the second floor

of the house Vermeer lived in.

That's the room Tim plans to construct.

I really hope to see firsthand

what Vermeer was up against,

if he was using this technique.

And try to get some idea

of how long it would take,

just to get the conditions right...

Just mundane things like how much

usable lighting do you get in a day.

So you're not going to use

any artificial light.

That's right.

And I'm only going to use materials

that Vermeer would have had.

Okay.

So, I'm going to force myself

into the constraint

of having to grind the pigments

and, you know, make the paint,

and use only pigments that he had access to

or that he used in his paintings.

For his experiment, Tim wanted

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