Tim's Vermeer
| Tim's Vermeer | |
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Poster
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| Directed by | Teller |
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| Written by |
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| Music by | Conrad Pope |
| Cinematography | Shane F. Kelly |
| Edited by | Patrick Sheffield |
| Distributed by | Sony Pictures Classics |
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Release date
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Running time
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80 minutes |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Box office | $1,671,377 |
Tim's Vermeer is a documentary film, directed by Teller, produced by his stage partner Penn Jillette and Farley Ziegler, about inventor Tim Jenison's efforts to duplicate the painting techniques of Johannes Vermeer, in order to test his theory that Vermeer painted with the help of optical devices.
The film premiered at the 2013 Toronto International Film Festival and was released in limited theatrical release in the United States by Sony Pictures Classics on January 31, 2014.
Tim Jenison is an inventor who has become the successful founder of NewTek, a company working in various fields of computer graphics, most notably the 3D modelling software LightWave 3D. Jenison, himself both an engineer and art enthusiast, becomes fascinated with the paintings of Johannes Vermeer, a 17th-century Dutch painter, whose paintings have been oft cited to have a photographic quality to them; Jenison, spurred by the book Secret Knowledge by British artist David Hockney and Vermeer's Camera by British architecture professor Philip Steadman, theorizes that Vermeer potentially used a camera obscura to guide his painting technique.
His initial idea, that Vermeer used a simple light projection to paint, is quickly discarded after concluding that painting over a projection makes it nearly impossible to match the colors correctly. Jenison then has an epiphany of using a mirror to monitor parts of the picture: by placing a small, fixed mirror above the canvas at a 45 degree angle, he is able to view parts of the original image and the canvas simultaneously, and obtain a precise color match by continuously comparing the reflection of the original image with what he has put on the canvas, moving from area to area by simply moving his own point-of-view slightly. When the edge of the mirror "disappears", he has it right.
Building a quick crude prototype and using a photographic portrait of his father-in-law, Jenison produces an oil painting that looks nearly identical to the photograph. After building a prototype with a lens that is able to capture a real-life object, Steadman and Jenison, neither of whom has classic artistic education, take turns painting and produce an impressive oil painting of a vase. Both Hockney and Steadman note that their respective books have caused controversies in the art historian circles, who viewed the theory as an "intrusion of crass rationalists" and "the misunderstanding of the nature of art".
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