TIM JENISON PAINTS A VERMEER. In the movie Penn and Teller show how Penn’s friend Tim Jenison reproduced Vermeer’s The Music Lesson. Jenison had never painted before. However, he was an expert in computer graphics and digital video. This gave him an advantage. He says in this interview with Phil Brown on the collider.com site: “I knew as a video guy that humans don’t see a wall the way cameras do….Because of working on video compression and things like that,…we know … what the eye can’t see [sic] and what it can’t.”
Jenison used only tools available in Vermeer’s time. He ground his own lenses. As this Variety review by Peter Debruge describes, he spent 213 days making an exact model of the scene in Vermeer’s picture in a San Antonio warehouse. The painting took longer. Apparently the most important tool was a mirror at a 45 degree angle (although, says Jenison in the interview, “It turned out to be not quite that simple.”)
Penn’s last line in the movie is: “My friend Tim painted a Vermeer.â€