The Mind's Eyes

Since childhood, Ryan and Trevor Oakes—artists and identical twins—have been engaged in a collaborative investigation of light and the way our eyes and minds perceive it. This investigation they have carried out through, and in service of, their shared artistic practice. Their best-known works are a series of concave perspective drawings and paintings whose shape is based on the insight that the light rays intercepted by the human eye are the radii of a sphere. The twins execute these concave works with their “double-ghost drawing” technique, which turns their own defocused binocular vision into a kind of camera lucida, allowing them trace what they see one narrow strip at a time.

In The Mind’s Eyes, the Oakes twins recount their entire artistic journey: their childhood experiments with eyesight and perception; their education at the Cooper Union, where they created rule-based sculptures whose emergent forms led them to a new understanding of the geometry of light and vision; and the nearly two-decade evolution of their concave perspective works, in which they have relentlessly explored line, form, and, more recently, the representation of the passage of time.

This book is illustrated with more than 70 full-page reproductions of the Oakeses’ finest works, as well as a pop-up reproduction of one of their concave drawings. The Mind’s Eyes will appeal not only to followers of contemporary art but to anyone who is interested in perception, cognition, and the connections between art and science.

Author Biography

Ryan and Trevor Oakes were born in 1982 in Boulder, Colorado, and both received BFAs from the Cooper Union. Their work is held in numerous public and private collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, and they have exhibited at venues ranging from the National Museum of Mathematics to the Getty. Ryan and Trevor Oakes were born in 1982 in Boulder, Colorado, and both received BFAs from the Cooper Union. Their work is held in numerous public and private collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, and they have exhibited at venues ranging from the National Museum of Mathematics to the Getty. David Hockney is one of the most influential British artists of the twentieth century. He has produced work in almost every medium—painting, drawing, stage design, photography, and printmaking—and has stretched the boundaries of all of them. His previous books include David Hockney’s Dog Days and Hockney’s Pictures, as well as his books in partnership with Martin Gayford, including A History of Pictures: From the Cave to the Computer Screen and Spring Cannot Be Cancelled: David Hockney in Normandy. He continues to create and exhibit art, and to inspire enormous affection and admiration worldwide. Lawrence Weschler, a former staff writer for the New Yorker, is the author of Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees and other acclaimed books about art and culture.