Tim's Vermeer Page #5

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It's a very complicated structure

in terms of its nervous organisation.

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 fibres 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 metre can.

When we see two values side by side,

it's easy to compare them.

But when we split them,

that ability goes away.

There just isn't any mechanism

in the human nervous system

to turn the eye into a light metre.

And this is a very clever trick

for reducing information,

but it's 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 do that.

But if Vermeer used something

like Tim's device,

the painting becomes possible.

The Queen of England

owns Vermeer's Music Lesson

and she has it there in Buckingham Palace.

We thought since we were in England,

we'd stop by the palace and check it out.

But the Queen said no. So we shot

a whole tirade against the Queen.

But then...

Well, I just came out of that building.

That's where the painting is,

Buckingham Palace.

The day before Tim returned home,

the Queen changed her Royal mind.

She granted Tim a private audience

with The Music Lesson.

He had 30 minutes to study the painting.

The deal was, he could only record

the experience in his head,

no photography allowed.

And it was a great 30 minutes.

The painting is amazing.

It's very different than

I thought it would be.

The reproductions

don't do it any justice at all.

The colours are more muted.

It's slightly darker,

it's got a kind of an overall bluish cast.

But the astounding thing

is the amount of detail.

I put on my magnifying binoculars

and looked at the

virginals, and every stroke

of that decoration is there.

The Persian carpet,

you can see the individual knots.

The amount of devotion, or dedication,

or obsession

to get that amount of detail

that just makes a general impression

on the viewer,

but must have taken months of hard work.

I don't know if I can even come close.

When Tim got back to San Antonio,

he was in trouble.

When he looked directly at the virginals,

he could see the intricate pattern of

interlocking seahorses 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 there was something

he was missing.

He experimented with increasingly

complex arrangements of lenses and mirrors.

But nothing worked.

Then 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 realised if he just replaced

the flat mirror with a concave mirror,

like a shaving mirror,

he could make the bright

circle much larger.

So I realised

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.

Oh, boy.

Boy, you know, I'm 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,

call it a day's work,

and I looked up at the monitor.

I thought, "Man, 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 realised,

"No, I'm looking at the painting."

And it was just kind of like a...

You know, this project

is a lot like watching paint dry.

I can paint the costumes

by putting them on mannequins.

But to paint faces and hands,

I need 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 Claire.

Her two sisters, are also in town,

Luren 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.

Few students have ever been happier

to go back to school.

I may repaint that.

Excuse me a second.

The wind's trying to blow my shade down.

I thought you were having

a ghost visitation.

F***er!

Piece of sh*t.

We're gonna 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're just barely good enough.

And sometimes that envelope gets exceeded.

So if anything falls askew, your

painting's in no danger, is that correct?

No, I wouldn't say that.

- Okay.

- But, you know, I can always start over.

Another interesting thing happened.

What I noticed while I was looking at this,

I can see the straight lines

of the seahorse there,

and I can see the straight lines

that I've ruled already on the canvas,

the framework of the virginals.

All those are perfectly straight lines

because I laid 'em out with a straight edge

before I painted them.

Well, when 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 curved.

Probably not enough to throw me off

now that I'm aware of it,

but if I had just literally painted

that seahorse 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 held the painting sideways

like this

and I'm looking down these straight lines.

And there's something really crazy

about this.

The top and the bottom of the virginals

are absolutely straight.

Because when I look at it down here

at an angle,

I can see that it's a straight line.

The seahorse motif is curved.

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