BEHIND THE SCENES
REVEALING “TIM’S VERMEER”
WATCH THE
TRAILER
arrangements in each painting.
painted the wall accurately
A large window is situated on
and no one else really
the left side of the room, with a
painted like that because no
large back wall usually behind
one else could see it like that.
the subjects who are positioned
Vermeer’s paintings look like
near the window in each tableau.
photographs. It seemed he had
Jenison is particularly familiar with
television
lighting,
and
from experience knows that
figured out a way to paint on top of a projection, at least that was my hunch.”
the human eye is very poor at
For
accurately
people have commented on
discerning
varying
more
than
a
gradients on a large, white/
the
beige flat area, like the back wall
Vermeer’s
in Vermeer’s paintings. “It’s like
approximately 200 years prior
video compression. The retina
to the invention of photography.
squeezes a lot of information
Indeed, there was a great deal
down the optic nerve, so you lose
of speculation about the use
a sense of absolute brightness
of a camera obscura, yet there
from
seemed to be a missing step.
the
compression,”
he
explains. Thus, we can determine variations of light and dark on a white wall, but we cannot see them accurately. But, Vermeer painted it accurately. “He nailed it every single time he painted one of these walls, and none of
his
contemporaries
did.”
That is why Jenison believed Vermeer may have used some type of instrumentation to aid in his painting. “I was immediately drawn to the gradient on the wall, which ranges from very bright against the windows to very dark against the far corner,” Jenison recalls after visiting the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam and viewing some of Vermeer’s work on display there. But, the variations were more
photographic
century
quality
paintings,
of
created
“I was in the bathtub one day and this idea came to me out of the blue, that you can paint on top of a projection, in a manner of speaking, if you used a mirror [aside from the camera obscura],” Jenison says. “With the extra mirror, you can trace colors onto shapes – you are basically making a photograph.” Jenison devised a crude setup in
his
kitchen
and
tested
his hypothesis – “It worked amazingly well,” he says. “It was the first time I ever oil-painted, and it came out looking like a photograph.” Intrigued, Jenison searched
the
Internet
for
similar test results but came up empty-handed.
apparent in a small reproduction
To prove that his theory did
he saw in a book, attributing his
have merit, Jenison had to paint
background in graphics as the
under the same conditions that
reason he noticed this. “Vermeer
Vermeer did, and that meant
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LightWave Magazine Summer 2014 | www.lightwave3d.com