Penn & Teller-related or not, Tim’s Vermeer is a fascinating tale. At its heart is the work of Johannes Vermeer, who was accepted into his local Dutch painters’ guild in 1653, at age 21, with no recorded training as an apprentice or prior profile as an artist. The young buck promptly began painting masterful, singular, uncannily realistic pictures of light-filled rooms and ethereal young women, which were celebrated somewhat at the time but after his death, at 43, he and his work slipped into obscurity for two centuries.
I have to admit that when I was first given a copy of tonight’s Tim’s Vermeer to watch, I wasn’t particularly thrilled. Mainly due to the fact that it is a documentary crafted by one half of Penn & Teller – a magical duo that have long grated on my nerves. In spades. I was willing to forge ahead though in the interests of actually doing my job, and by god I was glad I did.
Penn & Teller-related or not, Tim’s Vermeer is a fascinating tale. At its heart is the work of Johannes Vermeer, who was accepted into his local Dutch painters’ guild in 1653, at age 21, with no recorded training as an apprentice or prior profile as an artist. The young buck promptly began painting masterful, singular, uncannily realistic pictures of light-filled rooms and ethereal young women, which were celebrated somewhat at the time but after his death, at 43, he and his work slipped into obscurity for two centuries.
Then, just as the advent of photography began making highly realistic painting seem pointless, the photo-realistic Vermeer painting ‘Sphinx of Delft’ is rediscovered and his pictures are suddenly deemed of the moment and extremely valuable. By the time of the first big American show of Vermeer paintings- at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in 1909, no less - their value had increased another hundred times, and by the 1920s ten times that. Vermeer was big news, and his impeccable technique both celebrated – and as time went on, widely debated.
Outspoken artist David Hockney and others have speculated over the years that a camera obscura could have helped the Dutch painter achieve his photo-realistic effects in the 1600s, but no one could actually work out exactly how such a device might actually have been used to paint masterpieces. Also, the art-history establishment has remained adamant in its romantic conviction: maybe he was inspired somehow by lens-projected images, but his only exceptional tool for making art was his astounding eye, his undisputable genius.
Which brings me to Tim’s Vermeer, which has as its main protagonist an inventor in Texas who just may have solved the riddle.
Tim Jenison is the founder of NewTek, where he has made a considerable fortune inventing hardware and software for video production and post-production. He has also built the likes of giant model airplanes and battle robots, and is quiet and self-deprecating for someone who has achieved a fair chunk of wealth using his brain and general nous.
In 2002, one of his daughters, then a student at the Rhode Island School of Design, recommended he read Hockney’s book ‘Secret Knowledge’, which follows the artist as he investigates the painting techniques of the Old Masters. Hockney’s extensive research leads him to conclude that artists such as Caravaggio, Velázquez, da Vinci, and other hyperrealists actually used optics and lenses to create their masterpieces. In the passionate yet pithy book, Hockney takes readers on a journey of discovery as he builds a case that mirrors and lenses were key to the work of some of the world’s most legendary names.
As a guy who has spent his whole career reproducing and manipulating visual images, and contemplating the deep nuts and bolts of how our eyes see differently than cameras do, Jenison had a strong hunch that Hockney was right, and took it upon himself to investigate more.
He travels to Vermeer’s own Delft again and again, scouting the places where the artist had painted. He learns to read Dutch. He pays for translations of old Latin texts on optics and art. Much later, he did a computer analysis of a high-resolution scan of a Vermeer interior, and discovered “an exponential relationship in the light on the white wall.” He is a man obsessed, and the results are fascinating to watch.
I don’t want to give too much away, but Jenison has a few amazing eureka moments, eventually deciding to reproduce ‘The Music Lesson’, a famed Vermeer work featuring a girl at a harpsichord, her male teacher standing at her side, the Delft north light flooding the room through leaded-glass windows. “My whole experiment was about getting the colours right. Colours are all determined by the lighting in the room, and The Music Lesson shows you the exact position of the windows,” he says.
Around the same time Jenison happened to get a call from his old friend Penn Jillette, the larger, half of Penn & Teller, in Las Vegas. “I hadn’t had an adult conversation outside of work in a year,” Jillette told a journalist at the time. “I needed to talk to somebody who has nothing to do with work and is not a child.” Jenison flew to Vegas that day. Jillette recalls, “I said, ‘Talk to me about something that isn’t showbiz.’ Tim said, ‘How about Vermeer? I’m working on this project….’”
You’ll have to watch Tim’s Vermeer to find out what happened in the end, but bear in mind that great artists in every age have used clever new tools and technologies. The same tools and technologies that many of us have at our disposal but could never hope to create at the same level with. Interesting thought huh?
Screening Times:
18/03/2015 08:30pm
19/03/2015 10:25am
22/03/2015 10:05pm
23/03/2015 09:30am
10/04/2015 02:05pm
20/04/2015 12:05pm