full interview_oakes twins_2.mp4
Ryan Oakes [00:00:00] They were really uncomfortable. The previous head-stabilizing devices were, they were chin rests. So it was like, you know, it's quicker to make, but you were like trying to, essentially you're trying to stabilize your eye, and you were doing it by like leaning forward and resting on your jaw, which is the least connected part of your skull to your eye. So then we, phase two, we did a version which came from the top, more like a hat. And that is, you now, it's keeping the eye held still at the center of the spherical curvature. So the eyes kind of like at the core of the earth Yeah.
Speaker 2 [00:00:32] Tell us, I'm the guy who walks out the 10th guy in the hour at the get-eat. What are you guys doing? Yeah. Tell me, what's the idea? What's the philosophy?
Ryan Oakes [00:00:42] Yeah, so we are essentially capturing realism as it appears to the eye. So as you look out into the world, of course we see space. This is a permanent feature of our human experience and it's a really age-old ambition to want to render how that looks on some sort of surface. This, you know, so these days we have photography, which makes capturing realism very, very simple. But prior to photography, it was a much more, it was the laborious process. I mean, in a way it was quicker to say, to capture like the verbal word, to write down language, in the sense it was easier, or it was faster, than to represent how space looked. Now we have cameras and cameras on our phones and it's very, really quick. And we're thus saturated in a world. A gazillion images. In any case, we are working in the same territory of wanting to represent how things look to the eye on a surface. And that said, the surface through a number of conversations and projects that we were building, we sort of came to realize that that surface was preferably a sphere or a portion of the interior of a sphere. That has to do with the physical shape of the light rays that come through your eye. So light is of course fanned out from your pupil and collectively those rays are all perpendicular to a sphere. So you have this kind of implied sphere of vision and if you really want to speak truthfully about three-dimensional space using a spherically curved surface is the surface that allows you to avoid some of the distortions and other idiosyncrasies of a flat picture plane. Yeah so yeah so we we built this easel um in 2004 and we've been making concave drawings and paintings on it ever since. With this current series we're standing here on the river and we're painting one vertical panel per day 11 consecutive days in a row in order to get a progression of time to incorporate it with the space that we've you know that our earlier works have shown. So this is the time and Series yeah, and yeah, this is it This whole project, this whole endeavor, was seeded by an observation, a sort of a-ha moment, if you will. That really launched us into this entire space of dealing with realism, and dealing with how things look to the eye. And that observation was this. It's that as human beings we have two eyes. It is a given. And we see the world with these two slightly different vantage points. And our brain stitches together these two slightly different images, and we get an understanding of three dimensionality because of this parallax from our right and left eye. So in that information processing, there's a little, there is a permanent feature that often goes overlooked. A sort of hidden feature. Yeah, that we refer to as the ghost image, the double ghost image. And this is that it anything that you are anything that is in your line of sight but that you are not converging your focus on, if you really pay attention, can be perceived as split into double and slightly transparent and ghost-like. So, and this is anything behind where your eyes are converging or in front of where your eye are convergent. It's a little easier to see it in front where your are convergent. So if you try an experiment like say, raise your finger and then look past your finger, or a pencil or some object, And you look past that object into the distance, you can see that it appears to divide into two versions of itself, and each one is kind of optically transparent. Effectively, your other eye is filling in the background information. You have this kind of superimposition of your pencil or palette knife or finger as it divides into double. Now, if you then shift your focus and look at your pencil, or your finger, these two ghost images will come back together, they'll align as one three dimensional version of your finger. And whatever is in the background, it's a little harder to perceive, but where's the background will be divided into double. So this optical doubling is a constant permanent feature of seeing the world with two eyes. Now, however, you can go your whole life without noticing it. Your brain actively discards one of the images or actively doesn't present your conscious mind with one of the images. Yeah. It uses the two images to construct an understanding of three dimensional space and then it tells your conscious brain, here's what the three dimensional space is, this is what you care about. And then it doesn't show you the means that it used to achieve that calculation. And essentially everywhere you look- But those means are there and they're perceptible if you tune into them. What we did for this is, well, we noticed the- Sorry to tell you how hard this is. We noticed that that your drawing implement could split into double and then realize subsequently that if you had, if you're holding your drawing tool to the page, but instead of looking at the page you looked beyond it, you would cause the drawing tool to divide and double, the real one would remain touching the page but its second ghost image would appear to float next to the image and it's optically transparent so it's not, you can still see all the details of the real scene beyond coming through. And you could then literally trace the proportions and location of objects and record them in a one-to-one manner onto the canvas. Yeah, essentially it was like a realization that you could, just from how your eyes are working in tandem. And record all the characteristics of real space, three-dimensional space, and plot them onto a page if you worked along the edge and you used this double ghost image of your pencil. And so essentially it's a recording device. Over the last 15 years, we've been exploring various territory within that realm, and this is the most recent body of work within the congaist region. Yeah, so something like perspective, linear perspective, which was developed in the Renaissance, this rule set about how, at what rate space appears to shrink. How parallel lines converge towards the vanishing point on the horizon line, all these sort of visual cues that define space as receding into an image plane. Those cues are developed from how space looks in real life. And with this method, you're able to look at the real scene and gather all of that information and all that complexity of how the space is shrinking. You're just able to get it from the real thing. Yeah, without devising the geometric rules by which it behaves and then calculating it with compasses and. Yeah. And you can get. You can get the true infinite vanishing points that real space has. So in linear perspective, there's one point perspective, there's two point perspective. There's three point perspective that you can add more and more vanishing point and the calculations become more and more complex accordingly. These days with computers, it's easier to do all that processing and have a bunch of vanishings points. But real space, as seen by our eyes, has infinite vanishing points. In that, it sort of, it appears to get smaller in every direction. Like if you took a tennis ball, threw it at whatever angle, it would shrink as it goes away from. By using this method, you're just looking at real space, you're recording those characteristics, and you're getting all the matching points.
Speaker 3 [00:09:02] So have you had, like, a scientific response to your work, or scientists have said, Whoa, I'm really interested in what you guys are doing.
Ryan Oakes [00:09:12] Yeah, in various ways, most of these drawings or paintings at this point have been made in public spaces. You always have to be on site with whatever scene you're drawing, so you're not taking a photo of work from the studio. If you're in a space that's open to the public, then you end up interacting with That's an unknown number. And unknown people that just come and walk by and see what you're doing. So in that we've met a number of people who have responded from a kind of like an optical perspective and a scientific perspective. One of the early ones was an ophthalmologist who lived near Union Square and he had some interesting observations to tell us about about how the eye is working. He actually had some interesting ideas that we tried out, and they were, they didn't work as planned, but it was nonetheless interesting. In the morning you're rushing to make sure you get all the colors of the sky, the land, and the water to be cohesive, um, and in the same world. Frequently, I'll do an hour to two hour session where I just pop in and I won't pop out. And if there's something really unique like a thunderstorm that you know is gonna move, I'll just like. Work extra long but towards the evening it's you know probably 20 to 40 minutes would be an average session before you step out and stretch a little bit.
Speaker 3 [00:10:45] You know that idea of flow?
Ryan Oakes [00:10:48] I've heard of it a little bit, yeah.
Speaker 3 [00:10:49] It's what he experienced in his youth. We usually lose time. You don't know what time it is.
Ryan Oakes [00:10:54] Yes, you do lose time. You definitely lose time and at one point I tried listening to music while working and really didn't end up liking it because the songs, they might be three to five minutes and each one has an emotional exposition and an emotional swell and a resolution, they're all their own little time wave. When you're painting, to complete a passage, might be 45 minutes, maybe an hour. And each passage has that same sort of like slow build up like okay, we're like laying in some colors or filling them in like the medium scale detail, now finishing off, and like that is a song in and of itself, but it might be an hour long song. And it was just so much better to not listen to anything so that you're following your own rhythm, your own. Of your own song. The day will generally start with a big breakfast in the morning. So he's got a lot to chew on throughout the day. I try to eat enough food for breakfast that I don't have to eat a snack until sunset. And the strips are ideally are finished at sunset. That's really the goal. If they're not, I can finish up. I'll have all the colors already mixed on the palette and I can certainly finish up in the studio at night. I'll put down scale notation and textural notations so I know what it will be the water that will be unfinished, if anything. So if I know that I won't be able to finish, I'll notate as much as I possibly can and then I can finish up. But preferably and usually they're done by sundown. It's harder in the winter, obviously easier in the summer. Yeah, summer is a cinch to finish by sundow. When you finish a painting, what do you feel? You get a big dose of satisfaction, usually, but the last day of the painting is also the most tenuous and nerve wracking because that last strip is your opportunity to resolve the visual currents that have occurred by chance. You don't know what the weather's gonna look like, but on day 11, you've had 10 pieces of chance in place and they did whatever they were gonna do. 11Th day, you just really hope that you can resolve the flow of the energy. So it's a mix of like stress mixed with satisfaction, and then you end up staying up all night doing micro adjustments and like... There's a sort of tertiary problem solving that comes into place on the final strip. On the final trip, yeah. And things where you really have a decision, like where clouds are placed. Um, yeah. Like, or wear specific waves.
Speaker 3 [00:13:54] I have a technical issue. Just say things where you really have a decision. Just start from there.
Ryan Oakes [00:13:59] So, things where you really have a decision that you can make, like where clouds are placed. If you have a blue sky and fluffy clouds, you know, they're constantly moving. And so you really a decision about is there one here, is there on there, are they, you know. And so on your final day, those choices you want to somehow resonate with and harmonize with all the other bits of material which have landed across the previous 10 strips. And so there's a lot of like really scrutinizing like, should that cloud be taken out? Should that cloud go off the edge of the page? Should it run shy of the edge the page, like what's gonna be the most kind of resolving a powerful position, graphic position of these things to make the rest of the painting all fit together? And so that stuff becomes at the end.
Speaker 3 [00:14:50] So just to get back to that one question, because we're going to do another, and we want to do another to you guys, you know, tripods and all that. Science, scientists, and their response to you.
Ryan Oakes [00:15:02] Sure, yeah, okay, so you want to finish what you're saying? I'll pick it up where I started and then okay, okay so In general, these pieces are made in public spaces and if that's the case, we end up interfacing with lots of people that come by and they're like, are you communicating with Mars? What's happening here? And so in that we've met a number of interesting people and some people that have become quite good friends and really stuck. In terms of a scientific overlay, two people stand out to me. One, early on we met this ophthalmologist. Who lived near Union Square and was just kind of heading home one day. I think his building that he lived in was actually in the drawing we were making. So he was like. And so we're telling him about our optical method and how your eyes work in tandem and how we're exploiting the ghost image to make a rendering. And he had an idea which seemed really cool at the time and we did end up trying it. His idea was. In terms of the focal depth, your canvas is about a foot in front of your face, and then your other eye, which is viewing the scene, is viewing a sort of like infinity depth. Your two eyes are viewing different focal depths, and this is true that you can't have each. One's always blurry. Either the canvas is a bit blurry, or the scene's a bit blurred. You have to kind of snap back and forth. Trevor's actually learned how to decouple the focus from his convergence. It's not from each eye, but. His convergence and his focal plane, he's decoupled. It's like some sort of strange mental skill. In any case, this guy was like, well, you could solve that by, if you put in a plus three lens, like one glasses lens on the near eye, you could have the canvas in focus at a foot in front of you, and infinity in focus, and they'd both be in focus at the same time. So this seems like a really cool idea. We tried it, and it had a really interesting, Really unexpected. Wild. It was just wild. When you put in the lens, which is a magnifying magnification, 3x magnification. Yeah. You essentially take your paper or your canvas and you and you make it a little bit bigger. So then you take the real scene at no magnification and you kind of drag it onto the paper inside your brain. You plot it on the paper and then you take the glasses off and this one shrinks. You couldn't pan from one strip to the next. Like each area of the drawing was like scrunched. So it was very interesting to contemplate. Yeah, and it took a long time to wrap. Like the way he described it was fairly smooth to follow. But when it happened, it was like, how on earth did it get smaller? And it took, a lot of. Mulling on it to eventually distill it to that description. And it came from a dialog with this ophthalmologist. Another scientist that comes to mind is Chris Rom. Yes. Who was at the, so we're at the Getty, and we're nearing the end. It's really intense. It's a rush. Trevor's working, and I think I was off, I had to like go, I had go do something. So I was gone for a minute, And this, this, uh, this passerby, this visitor. Museum goer comes along this very polite voice just leans in yeah I'm focusing I basically have horse blinders because of the head holder so I can't really see people but his very polite voices chimes in from the edges like would you mind if I asked you a question I was like sure and the questions he asked were very provoking of answers and so we ended up all of the remaining time that we had at the museum that day. And then we ended up going to dinner that night, chatting all through dinner, and then we've been friends with the guy ever since. He turns out to be, he's a nanofabricator. He's worked for JPL, he was at UC-Hervine at the time, and his understanding of materials gets down to the atomic level. We've been lucky enough to have had shows at the National Museum of Mathematics, as well as the Simon Center. Stony Brook, which we're interfacing strongly with mathematicians. The most notable and probably the most in-depth conversation that we had with mathematician was with John Conway. I'm sure you know. Our interactions with John conway dealt more with a slightly different body of work than the concave drawings, but he seeded an idea that grew into a whole vein of projects, which we can get into that later when those projects are in front of us, when there's The interaction with Stefan Alexander was also probably one of the most exciting in terms of a dialog between scientists and ourselves. Yeah. Yes. As a third person, Stefan Alexander, we met by chance, and it really sparked a nice conversation.
Speaker 3 [00:20:15] There's a scientific component to what you do, and it strikes me as, don't take it from me, but people seem to think you're leaving a scientific legacy in addition to an artistic legacy. So that's what I just wanted to talk about.
Ryan Oakes [00:20:29] Sure, sure. Okay, so we, the two of us studied art and never had any formal training in science. We were very interested in science as children and taking things apart. But I think something about the, a lot of our artistic, like the root that we grew from artistically came from very, very keen observation and keen observation about the physical world. And a lot of it spilled into a similar role that a physicist might have of observing physical phenomenon, trying to figure out how it works and then incorporating that into the work we make. Our observation started initially with how the eye works. It's like, if you're gonna make visual art, let's investigate the apparatus of vision as a starting place. And we ended up thinking very specifically about the physical shape of light as it comes into your eye. And then of course, that shape is in response to the shape of the electromagnetic wave of light bouncing around the world. So a big part of starting to part... Starting to observe the eye was starting to then figure out, oh, the eye is doing this because light was doing that first. And so unpacking the shapes that light bounces in as it's emitted and then ricochets around the world, as well as the shapes of that it's extracted into the eye from. And so yeah, our the scientific side of our work dealt with sort of optical physics, as well as biology, biology of course being an offshoot of physics. As well as geometry, I would say. Geometry in the sense that light behaves in a way that is very, very, very geometrically symmetrical. It spheres, even, we can go into it in greater depth, but even when you have a reflection, people talk about, oh, the angle of incidence, maybe there's no sphere, but the angle incidence is simply preserving an earlier sphere that was there, this is easier to diagram than to speak of verbally. But it's like sort of entirely spheres. The world of light, and then the eyes of an inverse sphere sampling those rays. Light is really a spherical paradigm. Light and sight are both a spherical paradigms. Yeah. So, hey, I like that light and sight rhyme. Oh, cool. As a side note. But the medium of light, as we talk about a lot, is it's a spherical entity. As many things, like the medium of sound is also a spherical identity. So specifically. Yeah, specifically. Light being emitted from a point source, say a candle, is, it travels outward in an arrayed form, in a sphere that moves out into the world. And then if you take one individual ray, so now we'll think of say a laser pointer, that's gonna go, crashes into some surface, the wall, and it ricochets into, it scatters into another ambient sphere of information. So if it's a laser point in this case, you can imagine an entire auditorium full of people could see one red dot, because... That sphere of ambient light is reaching me, it's canvassing the entire auditorium, and everyone gets a little piece, and they can see that red dot. So then the eye, our instrument, which gathers light rays. It in and of itself is more or less a sphere, and the retina is sort of a cupped sphere. But also the way that the pupil samples the light rays is also, it's sort of this inverted, inverted sphere. The pupil is essentially. The lens, really. The lens. Sorry about the lens. I mean, are people... Would work as a pinhole camera, a pin-hole lens. In any case, anyways, the little hole in your eye that lets the light in, it kind of, it selects for and gathers only one little cluster, and the shape of that cluster is all the rays from the entire surround that happen to be aimed right at that point. So collectively you have this kind of inverted spherical cluster of rays Which travel to the pupil and get perceived on the right And, you know, as you move around, you gather a different cluster of light rays. Yeah. But it's always this shape of an inverted sphere, which is entering your perceptual space. So just to recap real quick, so light, the beginning of its journey goes out in a sphere, in the middle of its journeys it bounces around, it bounces out in ambient spheres, and as it's gathered by the eye, it's this inverted sphere. So that's what I mean by being a spherical paradigm. And then just to take that one step further, When we get it to make an image of something typically across most of history the image making has taken place on a flat plane and for that part mostly a flat rectangle um and this is like the flat paradigm and the spherical paradigm are really different yeah they almost don't mix together at all i mean and we've made them mix like history has made artists over the course of history have made the mix yeah but they really shouldn't I mean, it's a square peg and a round hole or a round peg and square hole. It's a... The discrepancy between the flat paradigm and the spherical paradigm plays out in tons of places. It plays out in... One is map projections. We know about the Mercator map projection where Greenland is stretched out as huge or the map projection where there's gaps. Where the globe is sort of unrolled onto a flat map. The spherical globe is unrolled on to a flat maps. And either there's gaps or things are stretched. You can't merge a sphere onto a flat plane. Yeah, and the same is true when you image the spherical visual world on a flat surface. Exactly, so cameras which are imaging onto a flat sensor or film have distortions depending on the lens. Yeah, so in this case when we're utilizing the base tool of the eye and the base medium of light rays, and we have elected to use a spherical imaging surface, to keep the picture plane in harmony with the spherical paradigm and that's allowed us to overcome and eliminate a lot of distortions which would otherwise be there.
Speaker 3 [00:26:44] Okay, so Marion has one more question, and then we got to get to the end of it. Totally separate. Tell the story about when you were born. Trees...
Ryan Oakes [00:26:58] Okay, sure So I think we, well, one aspect of being twins is that you always have somebody to externalize your ideas to and bounce them off of. And that's gone back to since the time we were born. And it's a really a nice tool for thought. So one of the early conversations we had was we were in a field where there had been two trees that had both been cut off. To these stumps, and we each climbed up on top of a separate stump. And we were looking off into the distance. Probably asking like, can you see this thing? Can, yes, I can see that, but I can't see that. Can you see that? And we somehow realized that, in a way, we were like each an individual eye, and they were like, and we knew that the two eyes worked together to create the inertial space. And so then the conversation led to, what if we were somehow like a giant, a giant entity, a giant monster with eyes, you know, 20 feet apart. What level of depth would we be able to perceive? How would depth perception change if your eyes were spaced that far apart? Yeah, and so the interesting, one interesting end point of that line of wondering is that you sort of come to realize that the original scale measurement humans have is the space between their eyes. The answer to that question is like, okay, if we had eyes 20 feet apart, the world would look like a dollhouse. I mean, there are scenarios where you have little miniature versions of the world that you look at with eyes that are relatively 20 feet a part. And so the world itself would become a doll house. And so that makes you realize, wait a second, this is the original scale measurement. This is the originally foot, so to speak, of the royal measuring unit. This is the measuring unit. That gives space the look that it has. The scale, the scale that we see, the life size. Life size is based on this unit and this separation. And if you were to change that, which you can put a periscope on each eye and effectively create wider binocular vision and things, yeah. Things look, they look miniaturized because you're used to, you know, you're looking at a little, like a miniature dollhouse couch and your eyes are spaced further, you have much broader parallax. On that little object and it feels small. So I think, you know, as kids, we're very visually oriented just from the get-go. And then having someone to discuss the nuances of your visual experience with allowed us to go really in depth and compare things. And so, yeah, I think that really it's through this dialog that we've been able to... Let's find and select and really get our fingers on these kind of intangible aspects of vision. Meaning like the ghost image. So when we talk about the ghost images and your pencil splitting into double and being able to use the split pencil to make a rendering, generally somebody would think of that split ghost pencil as being not real. It's sort of like, like if you go and touch the pencil, it's physically, tactically, it's one pencil. And so it's like, oh, well, it's double. That's not really real. But then it's, like, it is real. It's concretely real. It's part of your perception, which is the entirety of your world. And it's really there. And you can utilize it if you put in place some stabilization measures. So, yeah, such as a head cast. But, so, if you have your imaging surface, your sketch pad, or your, in this case, a spherical image. Held really still on a tripod. You have your head, your eye held really still via your head. And you have your scenes staying really still. All three of those are fixed in place. Wishy-washy double ghost image can become a kind of solid thing. If you keep your convergence on the distance it holds steady and you can utilize it to make a drawing or to record how space appears to your eye. So yeah I think that moving into that space was really facilitated as in conversation and in collaboration.
full interview_oakes twins_3.mp4
Ryan Oakes [00:00:01] We are here effectively making a painting, a curved painting on essentially a spherical easel.
Speaker 2 [00:00:09] Tell us why, why, what's the contraption, tell us what's going on.
Ryan Oakes [00:00:14] So this device, instrument, drawing, painting instrument. Thanks for it. I don't know.
Speaker 2 [00:00:19] Yeah, you should be looking at it. Yeah, I'm sorry. Yeah, right.
Ryan Oakes [00:00:20] Right, you could also say that again as... We are making a painting on her diesel. Alright. Right. We're making a painting on a curved easel. This is an instrument, a drawing and painting instrument that we built some years ago, and it essentially facilitates capturing a very realistic image, a very real realistic rendition of something that you're seeing in real life. It does that by utilizing your two eyes, your two sight lines, and how they work in tandem. And exploiting really a permanent and omnipresent feature of this binocular vision that can be perceived in the mind's eye if one pays attention to how the image from the left and the right eye are sort of overlapped and merged. So, to be specific, we use the term the ghost image, the double ghost image. And this is something that many people have probably noticed on their own. If you're looking past a thing that's in the foreground and your sight lines are converging in the distance, you can perceive that foreground object to divide and become disaligned and appear sort of in double. Of course, if you. Switch your focus and look at that foreground object, converge your right and left sight line on that. You'll see that object is singular and in sort of three dimensions.
Speaker 2 [00:01:55] Now we gotta go.
Ryan Oakes [00:01:57] I thought you were like, do the finger.
Speaker 2 [00:01:59] This part's worse. Yeah, that would be it.
Ryan Oakes [00:02:03] I sort of jumped in.
Speaker 2 [00:02:04] I am a very ambitious first grader and I want to know what you're doing.
Ryan Oakes [00:02:09] Yeah, yeah, yeah. I should be like we're using an awful illusion in your brain
Speaker 2 [00:02:15] Like, yeah.
Ryan Oakes [00:02:17] Super simple, super simple. OK. OK.
Speaker 2 [00:02:22] Is Marion at the right angle? Um, sure. Make sure Marion is in position.
Ryan Oakes [00:02:38] So, yeah.
Speaker 2 [00:02:39] Where are we? How long will you be here? Just give us a basic outline.
Ryan Oakes [00:02:43] Yeah, so we're here making a...
Speaker 2 [00:02:46] Hold on a second. That's all good.
Ryan Oakes [00:02:49] That's the alarm, gotta go.
Speaker 2 [00:02:51] Thank you.
Ryan Oakes [00:02:53] We're here making a spherical painting. We're gonna be, the piece will take 11 days. It's 11 consecutive days that we will render one after another. And it's one in a series of about a dozen or so that we've done at this point. We're utilizing a sort of optical illusion to take the real scene in the background and plot it onto the canvas. This optical illusion stems from how your two eyes work in tandem. Essentially, Trevor here, my brother, is with one of his eyes, he's looking around the piece of canvas at the scene in a distance. His other eye is viewing the piece of canvas and those two images are automatically overlaid in the brain. And if he's able to balance the image from his right eye and his left eye, he can see these two, the canvas and the scene in the distance, sort of 50-50 and overlaid together. Sort of like a ghost-like version of the canvas is like a veil over top of the real scene. At that point, he could copy one onto the other, seeing the scene sort of through the canvas as it appears in his brain. This is an optical illusion that anyone can do. And it happens automatically, because of how our eyes work in tandem. So you could try, for example, holding your finger up in front of you, look past it, and you'll see your finger appear to divide into two fingers. And each one will be a little bit transparent if you're able to balance your two eyes. So, oh yeah.
Speaker 2 [00:04:31] That was excellent. Anything else? We're going to get more when we come back. We just wanted to make sure that we situate ourselves here. Maybe you could even just say we're at Brooklyn Bridge. Normally we do a lot of painting along the Hudson River. We decided to come down here to Lower Manhattan.
Ryan Oakes [00:04:52] Yeah, I would refer to it as the Manhattan skyscraper is not the biggest one. Normally, we have been painting up along the Hudson River, further north, capturing the mountains with the river in the foreground. And now, we've come down here to Brooklyn. We're in the Brooklyn Bridge Park. And we're looking out across the East River to Manhattan in the distance. So we've taken the form of the paintings that we have made prior, which is horizontal water in the background and vertical mountains in the back. And now we have horizontal water and vertical skyscrapers.
Speaker 2 [00:05:36] Please go around, please go around.
Ryan Oakes [00:05:41] Um, so this piece is, this piece lands in a series of other paintings that we've made and where we're exploring horizontality and verticality. In this case, we're in Brooklyn looking across the East River to Manhattan. These buildings will probably be about three inches tall in the final painting and the water will take up the entire first half, water and sky. With about three inches of buildings in the middle.
Speaker 2 [00:06:13] Tell us today's...
Ryan Oakes [00:06:14] That's the time.
Speaker 2 [00:06:16] Tell us, today's the first day?
Ryan Oakes [00:06:18] Passing the time, right?
Speaker 2 [00:06:19] You and then say whether you know what it's going to be like when it's done or whether it's one of those things that evolve.
Ryan Oakes [00:06:29] Today is the first day that we're beginning this painting. It's going to capture 11 consecutive days. And for each day, we're going to try to complete it on one strip, one vertical strip, representing the weather on that particular day. When we come back the following day, the weather will have changed inevitably. So we will paint that condition. And over the course of the painting, we don't know what weather is coming, but we will pain whatever we get. And use that sort of element of chance to try and, or play with that element of chance to trying to resolve the painting. Rain or shine. We paint rain or shine, rain or sign. Maybe the only condition we might avoid would be lightning, but even then, with all these tall buildings around, we would probably come out here, even if it was a heavy storm, lightning and thunder. There's rain coming on Sunday. There's a, Trevor says there's rain coming on a Sunday. So we'll just set up an umbrella. Yeah, we have a white umbrella, so it still lets a lot of light through. And that it's enough to block out most of the water. We're also, because we work rain or shine. Oil paint, right? I know that. And metal. So, because we work rain or shine, we've selected our materials to be weather durable. We're using oil paint, which can stand up to getting water on it. It can even stand up being in freezing cold temperatures. We're also using metal as our painting surface. This is stainless steel sheet metal that's wrapped in aluminum. So, between the oil paint... Wrapped in a linen. Oh, sorry. Sorry, sorry, sorry! I said that wrong. It's stainless steel sheet metal that is wrapped in linen. It used to be aluminum.
full interview_oakes twins_5.mp4
Ryan Oakes [00:00:01] So, we're out here on the pier in Brooklyn, just south of the Brooklyn Bridge, and my brother Trevor and I are making a painting.
Speaker 2 [00:00:11] Okay, so, sorry, you already know that? Yes. Last time. Right. Okay, we're coming in and checking in, how are you doing?
Ryan Oakes [00:00:18] Yeah, I know, I was gonna get to that.
Speaker 2 [00:00:19] Okay, sorry. Go ahead. Let's wait for the vote, then. I will be more patient.
Ryan Oakes [00:00:33] It was like that that's what I had planned and I was like gonna just carry that into what you guys
Speaker 3 [00:00:38] I'm gonna have to get ready.
Ryan Oakes [00:00:53] Okay, so my brother Trevor and I are out here making this painting and right now we're in the middle, we're exactly in the middle. Today happens to be the solstice of the calendar year. It's the longest day of the year, and that's gonna be, that gives us the most working time for this very central margin of our painting. We're working in strips, one strip per day. So today represents the sixth day this captured in the painting. And there will be a total of 11 days. Because there's 11, we have one strip that sits in the middle. That's today, solstice. And. We're painting the weather as we see it this afternoon. So today is the sixth day of this painting. We're on the sixth strip, and it's right in the middle. So we have half the piece done. We have five more days to go. Today also happens to be the solstice, so it's the longest day of the year, and we're excited about the fact that that lands squarely in the middl. So the arc of time that we're capturing in this piece is sort of sitting right on the top of the. Right in the crest of the wave of the calendar day length.
Speaker 2 [00:02:15] Okay, so that was great. So we're gonna obviously get a close-up of the painting, but I'm looking now, I'm seeing six strips with totally different, looks like totally different weather and different kinds of skies and waters. So just talk about.
Ryan Oakes [00:02:29] The idea with this piece is that we're capturing time as well as space. Space and time are equal pillars of reality. The way we're capture time is by representing one day per vertical section of the painting. It takes of course many days to make a painting and at the onset we're confronted with How are we going to deal with the changes in the weather from one day to the next? In different pieces of the past, we paneled this in different ways. But with this work, we decided to render one strip for one day's weather, and you get whatever you get. So you work day after day after day after after day, and you have whatever weather comes along, representing a sort of daily passage of time. This piece is 11 vertical strips wide, and we're thus capturing 11 different days. We're representing 11 different day as you pan from left to right on the canvas. Today we're in the middle. We're on day six, strip six. It happens to be the solstice of this calendar year.
Speaker 2 [00:03:43] What? What has the weather been so far? What are the days that you've experienced so far, has it been a real challenge or differences or just...
Ryan Oakes [00:03:55] Yeah. So the weather's changing every day. We start on a given day, and we paint, and we just get what we get. That's part of the idea. So far in this piece, the first day was very much blue sky. And it had very energetic clouds, which we thought worked out as a nice start. Thereafter, you know, it gets a little cloudier, some blue sky that peeks through. We got a full-on blue day with just some wispy clouds at the top. Then we had two days of very cloudy. Today's the third day where it's sort of mixed. Right now it's the afternoon and we're seeing it is entirely cloaked in clouds, but this morning it was much more of a blend of blue sky and these some of you little fluffy clouds and some more searcy clouds in the background. So, even in a given day, the weather's changing. That gives you plenty of, that gives you a lot of things to choose from as you make the rendering.
Speaker 2 [00:04:58] And also, it's a bit of a mystery. You don't know how it's going to end up.
Ryan Oakes [00:05:01] Yes, you don't know how it's gonna end up, yeah. So, and then, part of the idea for us is not to curate the days. Not to say like, I want a sunny day next, I'll wait for a sunny or I want it to be a rainy day. It's like, you hit go on the painting, you start on day one and just work every single day and you get what you get. So there's a sort of element of chance involved. But then it's up to you to make choices within that and try to resolve the painting or help everything work well together. I would say, so yes, with this series, we're always working on site somewhere. It's always a realistic scene, and we're physically there. By and large, we've done the works outdoors, and this is no exception. We've chosen this spot because it has water in the foreground, the horizontal component, and buildings in the background which is a vertical component. We wanted to capture the expression of the weather from one day to the next. So the sort of daily beat of time, it's a very lived time, as opposed to say seasonal time. The water is responsive to the wind speed in a way that dry land is not. And therefore, the water expresses the weather in an even more heightened manner. For example, on a really still wind day, you can get a glassy reflection. And on a strong wind day with really strong wind, you can little white crested waves. So the movement of the water is more in response to the the wind as opposed to the current. So, Paying attention to how nature... Deals with the idea that we're going for is part of how we choose what to draw or paint.
Speaker 4 [00:07:02] In your work in ways perhaps different than the other works. It's about optics, it's about physical companies, about the world. You are interested in science companies from...
Ryan Oakes [00:07:21] Yeah, you could just be in and weigh in on this.
Trevor Oakes [00:07:26] Closely observing nature has always been an integral part of our exploration. The method that brought this project into being came from very closely observing the eye. And with this series of paintings, we're also each day very closely observing the subtle changes in color and light from the previous day.
Ryan Oakes [00:07:57] Yeah, this project started from a place of observation, visual observation, and just really paying attention to how it looks to see the world with two eyes. That led to this method that we came up with, and then building this, our drawing instrument device to facilitate executing the method. All along the way, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2 [00:08:31] We went out on a major interview and the guy lived under the approach to the National Airport in Washington. It was just ridiculous, but it was like this incredibly important.
Ryan Oakes [00:08:40] Yeah.
Speaker 2 [00:08:42] This is like that.
Ryan Oakes [00:08:44] And we're looking at Louis, right? Yep.
Speaker 2 [00:08:48] I think they're buzzing us. I think there's like, what's going on here? Yeah.
Ryan Oakes [00:08:50] Yeah.
Speaker 2 [00:09:01] So just start that thought, just pick that thought up.
Ryan Oakes [00:09:06] So the project started from an optical observation, paying close attention. But then to make the method work well, we had to build a lot of stabilization mechanisms. And that's what you see with our easel. It keeps the canvas really still, keeps Charles' eye really still. And further, it keeps his eye stationary at the center point of the spherical curve, such that the distance between his vantage is the same across every point on the canvas. If that wasn't the case, there would be distortions introduced into the overall rendering of the scene. So there's been a lot of... There's been sort of like a scientific way of moving forward one step at a time to develop the project. Sort of like, it's like optical as well as some sort of engineering things. For example, the head stabilizing cap, it has two axes of rotation. It has the lazy Susan on top so the driver can look side to side. And the pivot point there is in line with his left eye. So when he looks from the right to the left edge of the canvas, his eye doesn't move in space. Like for me standing here, if I turn my head side to sides, I'm pivoting on my neck. So my eyes are moving around. But for this method to work very well, your eye needs to stay stationary at the center point, at the sort of core of the earth. And so we need an axis of rotation to guide him that was in line with the left eye. The same goes for the horizontal axis, which you see the little, looks like horse blinders on the side. Position there such that the the pivot bar is on eye level and when he looks up and down he's also having his left eye not change his position in space so it's sort of like gyroscopic mobility about the left eye things like that, you know, get into sort of engineering considerations or scientific considerations to just make the method work well.
Trevor Oakes [00:11:15] I'll translate it maybe like this. So when we were young artists, we were always very inspired by keenly observing nature. And in this case, keenly absorbing the eye or observing kind of the act of observation in a kind of almost like a meta way. And then as we began to put together pieces of the puzzle and like, concretely like, okay, this is like, this is a solid piece of how it works. Saver is if the light rays are fanned out from the pupil. Then we would. After ruminating on it, you would often be able to deduce, say, like one or two other pieces. So little by little, we started to kind of cobble together this understanding of human vision. And all along the way, we were building the easel and the head holder, and we were building various apparatus to try and. Artistically express this understanding of vision that we that we were coming to. And then as we started to build our gear, every step of the way, we'd also notice like, oh wait a second, the way that the first the first way we tried it wasn't didn't quite work or because you know, then the nuance between which eye you place on center actually really matters. And so we had to refine and build multiple iterations of gear that also then contributed to our sort of full- full understanding of what this entity of, you know, light, the world, and the eye observing all of it. Yeah, in many ways you could shorten it to say we're slowly unraveling a kind of expose of what light's behavior is, and specifically what shapes light moves in, because of course there's a lot about light at a quantum scale that you can't observe with your eye and You couldn't guess that that's what it's doing. And that's, you know, what, fine men and all those. Wonderful guys we're discovering. But at this scale of observation you can see... Sort of deduce a lot about the shapes that light is moving in and those shapes are interesting. Invisible they're like they're not readily apparent and your brain actively doesn't tell you what the... That's a very technical, slightly more detailed thing to try to say in one sentence. But the shapes that light's moving in, which is popping around in these spheres, your eye is using the spherical nature of the electromagnetic wave to construct a likeness of space. And the eye, in fact, evolved to be in harmony. The light was moving in those shapes. For millennia, and the eye evolved to be in harmony with those shapes. And the lens specifically takes widening spheres of light information. They canvass the entire lens, the lens bends them and sends them back down to a point. So on your retina you'll you'll end up with an understanding of a crisp point that represents kind of where the light erupted from but you don't see that there was a sphere that then collapsed back to a point in in the middle. Like your your brain Yeah, those aspects are invisible, so to speak, but you can kind of deduce they're there by keen observation.
Speaker 2 [00:15:08] No. It's the results, it's not the, you know, right, your eye just picks up whatever the final result is.
Trevor Oakes [00:15:17] Yeah, so to really walk through, in a detailed way, the shape of ambient light, Brian spoke about it a little bit with the laser metaphor. So, okay, to try to walk through it verbally, diagrams would be so much easier here. Direct light.
Speaker 6 [00:15:44] Imagine that we can put a diagram in. Yes, yes, yes. OK. Let's just wait for the boat to come in. Yeah.
Ryan Oakes [00:15:50] Yeah, make sure you are you shifting around maybe I'm probably let's make sure we're selling shot
Speaker 2 [00:15:59] You guys are fine. Yeah, that's good. Three of you.
Trevor Oakes [00:16:03] Yes, yes, he's a third brother. Easel Oaks, yes.
Ryan Oakes [00:16:07] It is, it's easel oaks.
Trevor Oakes [00:16:13] Yeah, we have Ryan, and Trevor, and Oaks, and Easel Oaks. No, just Easel. And Easel!
Ryan Oakes [00:16:20] Ryan, Trevor, and Easel.
Trevor Oakes [00:16:26] Okay, so within light you have light is created in the first place.
Speaker 2 [00:16:39] I'm trying to make sure we're not on the other side. It's low. We can wait until the other one. I thought that was one. Yeah. So you know, it's probably going to be too complicated for us, I'm just being honest. Okay. I'm thinking about it now, given the context of everything. Okay. But that's okay. Thank you, Christian.
Trevor Oakes [00:17:10] Or we'll just answer the loop. I'll try to say it really simply and fairly quickly.
Ryan Oakes [00:17:15] Okay, and then we'll jump in.
Trevor Oakes [00:17:17] Okay, so through some chemical process, light is created, and photons are released, energy is released. Usually it's a flame of some sort, whether it's the flame of the sun, candle. And when light, so direct light is created that bursts away from its source in a spherical shape that expands outward like an expanding bubble. Each little piece of that wave that crashes into some physical surface will ricochet off and scatter. Into a smaller sphere of ambient light, and the little piece of the wave next to it will scatter into its own ambient sphere, as will its neighbor, as will it's neighbor. So you end up with this multitude of expanding waves that are all overlapping each other in the air. Your eye, the lens of your eye, about a centimeter wide, steps into that environment of, steps into those multitude of spheres, and every single one of them canvases the entire width of the lens, and the lens passes. Each of them simultaneously through itself, and then by flexing a button. Bends the widening spheres, and sends them back to a point on the retina. So on your retina now, you have all of these little teeny points that represent the centers of eruption where the ambient spheres came from, but you don't see the ambient sphere in the middle. All that blending of the ambient spheres, they're kind of all meshed together and in a way blended in the air in front of you. You don't, you don, you, don't you don't see that? Your eye then performs a sorting mechanism, or it performs this sorting task, where it individuates every beam and places it at a different spot on the retina, such that you now have a bunch of crisp points of light that are a likeness of the eruption centers from where that light came. And so figuring out those rather complex, but also beautiful shapes within light. Was a really a driving inspiration for us throughout this entire journey. What the easel is, is if you want to take those shapes within light and kind of take the three dimensional forms in front of you and collapse them to a picture plane as is a thing within art, the shape of that picture plane being spherically concave places it in harmony with the shapes that light is already moving in, and really more specifically the shapes that your eye is extracting that light. We've got an inverted spherical burst of extraction that your eye performs. Yeah. OK. And then we'll end it. All right.
Speaker 6 [00:20:24] As soon as we're clear that, I was just wondering, in the context of today, what you're hoping people get from a painting, generally, and sort of, in real time, what the reactions have been as you've interacted with people today.
Speaker 3 [00:20:45] I don't know if that's what you're saying. Okay. Yeah.
Speaker 2 [00:20:50] Do you need the phone number? No, I don't.
Speaker 7 [00:20:53] Yeah.
Speaker 2 [00:20:54] Okay, all right, to me? Yeah.
Speaker 7 [00:20:59] Do you want to start?
Speaker 2 [00:21:00] Let's give it, give it a go.
Speaker 7 [00:21:02] If you have something, then? Yeah, sure, I'll go.
Speaker 2 [00:21:05] Yeah, we're about to leave.
Ryan Oakes [00:21:15] Evenings are gonna get tight a lot of people arriving Get on all those guys chains here Katie's kids on the way So let's try to answer quickly. Yeah.
Speaker 2 [00:21:38] You know, we're going to come back too, so nothing is ever finished with us. Okay? Alright.
Ryan Oakes [00:21:44] Um, okay, yeah, so in terms of today, um, I mean, we're out here every day. Stop and ask questions. They wonder what we're doing. Some people think we're communicating with Mars. As the painting gets more and more finished it becomes more self-explanatory what's happening. We've learned from doing these pieces in any public settings that people definitely ask questions. So that's sort of that's become a component where you know we're happy to to explain what we are up to. There was a split second in the beginning when we thought Should we keep the method a secret? We decide not to.
Trevor Oakes [00:22:25] So, with this painting, folks that see it have said things like, Oh, I never would have noticed that there's that many variations within the weather. From one day to the next. That's always a nice response. People have also said that they see the world differently. Some people will see the curve of the canvas and intuitively kind of understand that it's rooted to our anatomy. And yeah.
Ryan Oakes [00:23:00] Yeah, it's funny, some people will be able to guess like 10 things and get them all right, just intuiting it from what they're seeing. And other people will have very little idea.
Speaker 6 [00:23:18] Just a quick thought, you kind of glossed over a very profound statement that people say they see the world differently based on your work. Is that a goal of yours, or does that mean something to you? Is that an emotional? Sure.
Trevor Oakes [00:23:33] Yeah, so people say that they see the world differently, which we, of course, is very meaningful to us. I guess I would say... I guess, well. One goal, I feel like, in doing art in general, is to offer people, or hopefully, to get people to have some sort of a-ha moment of their own. And that doesn't necessarily have to have anything to do with the series of aha moments that led to us creating this series, but it's nice when somebody says, oh, I put some pieces of my own mental exploration together. After seeing your work. And we have had folks say things like, oh, I see the world differently, or I understand the weather differently, or I have a different understanding of the interaction between time and space. Yeah, it's always a nice feeling to have made an impact on someone's perception of the world.
Speaker 4 [00:24:53] How is it different painting this East River for a person with mountainous buildings?
Trevor Oakes [00:25:03] Yeah. Yeah. All of the early pieces in the series were about an hour north on the Hudson. The biggest difference between this vantage point and that was the direction that we're facing. In this we're facing into the sun, and up there we were facing away from the sun. So that changes the color of the water significantly. When the sun is behind you, as it begins to sink low in the sky, the color of the water will go almost red. It's a, like, you wouldn't expect it. The water has much, much more of a green tone to it. Now, that's also probably due to New York City being entirely, probably entirely sea walls. Like every single cusp of the perimeter of the water is a sea wall. And an hour north, there's not as many. So you have a lot more just like mud mixing in the water. No, go ahead. The direction of sound also changes our working method. It's cloudy today, but when it's bright, we'll end up having to put tape on the front of the easel to block out the sun as it drops, so it's not blinding me while painting. Sure. We can discuss the buildings versus the mountains, that's a little more...
Ryan Oakes [00:26:46] Yeah. Or there were the boats, and then this water never sits still, because there's tons of boats. The difference between painting on the East River and painting on The Hudson further north. Is like Trevor said, the sun is setting in front of us now. It's a huge difference. There's also vastly different boat traffic happening here. There's huge barges up on the Hudson as well, but here they're like nonstop with the ferries and the water taxis and the police boats and the FDNY boat. And all that boat traffic means that the water never sits still. It's always in some type of wave movement. Yeah, so where is Upstate! If there's no wind, you can have an entire day when the river sits like glass and you can see a reflection of a radio tower on the distant mountain range, that's how still it is. This never gets that still. But it also, it has these sort of giant waves. Generated by all the ships. And that makes for really quite a quite different texture. As you reinvent how to paint the water each day, it's like there's sort of new solutions that we're coming up with based on how this water moves.
full interview_oakes twins_9.mp4
Ryan Oakes [00:00:00] We've been making pretty good progress on the painting. We're on, we have two strips left. And then we'll be reaching the bridge and finishing the piece. It's been going pretty well. We've out here every single day. It's kind of exhausting, but we're happy with the progress. Today is really clear and sunny. This strip before this, it was raining very hard, which we were excited to get a rain day. And it really did. I mean, the skies got super dark. Brain came down and it lasted most of the day.
Speaker 2 [00:00:34] So any, when you started the journey to now, any kind of surprises, unexpected developments?
Ryan Oakes [00:00:42] Um, that's a good question, um, I, hmm, I suppose being out here on the pier in Brooklyn, there's been a lot of foot traffic. The people that we've run into, that we know, other interesting dialogs that have happened, conversations. It's been a whole collection of people that have flowed through that we chatted with. For example, this morning a guy comes through with his bicycle, like a road bike, and it was all saddled out with very waterproof bags, and it was kind of covered in dirt. And I was just like, that's a long bike ride. That's not just someone out. You know, out for the afternoon. So I said to him, I was like, where did you start? And he was like San Francisco, 50 days ago. And he's been riding his bike through the Grand Canyon and over the Rockies and out to Montauk. And then he was going from Montauks back to Manhattan, was here in Brooklyn before he gets to Manhattan. Stuff like that.
Speaker 2 [00:01:45] I was going to say, do artists commit?
Ryan Oakes [00:01:48] Yeah, there's been, yeah, yes. Definitely other artists come by. Someone came by yesterday, Trevor. You wanna tell the story about the guy that came by, yesterday? Sure. Should I check his name? I'm gonna check what his name is. What's his last name? I forget.
Speaker 2 [00:02:05] Don't worry about it, just keep going.
Ryan Oakes [00:02:08] So an artist came by yesterday named Paul and he was looking at my palette and he just kept saying your palette is so organized, your colors are so organized and then it turns out he's the polar opposite. In his studio he says I'm grabbing whatever color tube is nearest by, I don't even care what the color is, I'm having a tantrum on the canvas and somehow it works. So it was nice to have that contrast of, like... I don't think of myself as particularly organized, but nice to be characterized as such. I think the palette looks very organized. I think all of this. These are the colors from days past, sort of stored and tucked to the side. Yeah. At the end of every day, I'll scoop the colors, the colors I've mixed for that day, I'll just scoop them and stash them off to the sides and let them dry. So there's a record of exactly what pigment compositions were used for each strip.
Speaker 2 [00:03:14] So are you looking forward to the end of the process? Is it like, is there a point in which it's kind of like, okay, we want it to be over with?
Ryan Oakes [00:03:20] Um... It's always nice to reach the end of a painting. You, in some ways, you really, really scrutinize the early strips. And you spend a lot of time looking at them, and things are getting going. And then as you get to the end, you're kind of just like, it's like, oh, I don't know. Not exactly like you coast, but you're kinda like, okay, just whatever happens, happens, doesn't it? So we're at that phase. It's just, it on autopilot in some way.
Speaker 2 [00:03:51] Now it's downhill, I mean like rolling road.
Ryan Oakes [00:03:53] It's the downhill. We're on the downhill slope. Yes.
Speaker 3 [00:03:59] So different than coming to the end.
Speaker 2 [00:04:02] Camera around here, look at me.
Ryan Oakes [00:04:06] Is it different than coming to the end of one of the Hudson River paintings? It is, so we've prepared this composition to be similar to the Hudson River paintings in a lot of ways, or in one particular key way. Towards the end of the painting, the river in the Hudson river series opens up and you have the mouth of the river, the mountains drop to drop and then rise again. In this skyscraper. Progression they also are high and then they drop to where the the ground is you know softer and so you have a little low-lying area and then it's gonna pop up again so I'm just reaching that moment We refer to the little piece that pops up as the coda of the song.
Speaker 2 [00:05:00] One more question, and then...
Speaker 4 [00:05:04] Well, I was curious what, now that you've had so many people come up to you over the last 15 days, what's the top few things that people are curious about, what do people ask you?
Ryan Oakes [00:05:17] Yeah, that's a good question. Yeah, go ahead. I think, well, so a lot of people ask, what is this? What are you doing? People have different levels of intuition into sort of being able to read.
Speaker 2 [00:05:37] A bunch of people were running for election and they were talking about how they were hiding helicopter noise. I never would have cared about it, and now it's like, yeah, we gotta do something about it. It's so awful. Okay, let's start over again please.
Ryan Oakes [00:05:53] Yeah, so some people can just deduce a lot about what's happening from looking and then others are asked for more explanation. There's even people who don't believe the explanation that I'm telling them. For example, a woman comes by and she's saying, is he really painting or is he just pretending to paint? She's like, my friend and I are having a debate. And I was like, no, he's really painting. And she's like, I mean, but for a performance art perspective, he could just be pretending. Like, you know, could be. That's within the realm of possibilities. It just doesn't happen to be the actuality of this possibility.
Speaker 2 [00:06:38] Also, you work a damn hard, so I didn't just pretend it. So my question was...
Ryan Oakes [00:06:45] I'm at.
Speaker 2 [00:06:46] Thank you, Fred.
Ryan Oakes [00:06:47] As we reach farther and farther into the painting, near the end of the painting people are able to figure out that it's days more regularly. Early on they would always not quite know and now people are like, oh, it's a progression of days.
Speaker 2 [00:07:02] We can see people, the penny dropping on some of the people when we filmed last week, where they could like, oh, this looks good. Oh, yeah, yeah. It's nice, but watch it in real time, you know, the idea.
Speaker 3 [00:07:12] Yeah.
Speaker 2 [00:07:13] Can you appreciate the city more by having to study it so closely? Or is it just landscape, like say the way the mountains are landscape mostly?
Ryan Oakes [00:07:23] Well, this landscape is very different than the mountains as a landscape there's with the city there's all these little corners that you have to paint yourself into and windows to dot on and precise like it's taking it takes, you know, it's it's a lot more Painstaking in a way. You have to precise the mountains too But if they you know if the mountain wobbles a bit It doesn't matter whereas if one half of your building is taller than the other half like you can notice Yeah encouraged us to really scrutinize each building, like what is that building, as opposed to just the skyline in general. And we've ended up doing, you know, web searches on a number of buildings and now we know a whole lot more. So it's been a little history lesson. I think I have a heightened appreciation for the history of this area, just spending this time here. Like the history right where we are now, but also what we're looking at. That's the South Street Seaport, this is the old Fulton Ferry. You know, the ferry now goes to a different spot. Like somebody was saying yesterday that the ferry was begun in say 1830s or so, and by a gentleman named Fulton who had invented the boat. And then I guess Mr. Pierpont who had a bunch of land in here in Brooklyn, wanted his land to be more valuable and so he like set up the ferry service to bring people over here. So yeah, there's a lot of appreciation for the, You know. Leagues and leagues and leagues of history which are overlaid in this
Speaker 3 [00:09:00] So as you do...
Speaker 2 [00:09:03] That was great. You stay right where I'm staying.
Speaker 3 [00:09:09] As you get towards the end of this painting and think about how you're doing another one of the series, does it inform you in any way about how people see, about how groups see?
Ryan Oakes [00:09:24] That's a good question. As we develop this into a series, is it influencing our understanding of how we see or how people see? That's a good question. There's a number of nuances about this vantage point, which are new. This is the first time we've ever faced directly into the sun. And that changes the way the sky plays out, the way colors in the water play out. Yeah, the working process. Yeah. I'm trying to think of a... Yeah. Well, just to add to that, the way the water moves in this harbor is very different than how it moves upstate. It's, you know, out of the depth of the river or the shape of this particular seawall as it goes down, all the boats that are constantly passing through, there's like a large sloshing waves that are almost never dissipating. And then there's almost a bigger occurrence that flow through here. So when you're painting the water, the water moves too fast for you to fully see what it's doing. So you can glean aspects of its behavior. And then whichever aspects seem to be most apparent are the ones that I'll pull out and develop my paint strokes. Algorithm of my little recipe of strokes for that particular day. Over time after observing the water again and again and again, even though it's moving slightly too fast, you do start to figure out foundational elements of its behavior which allow you to then deduce what the like what's going on and to be a little more specific the the day that taught me the most about the water was the first day that was perfectly still when there was no wind at all and the water was like a mirror the that day was up on the Hudson River and the mountain. Folded down onto the surface of the water as though it was a perfect, perfect mirror. And the sky above it folded down to be below the mountain in the water. And at the horizon line, the reflection was very crisp, almost the same value and brightness as the sky itself, a little bit more dim, of course, because some of the light of course goes into the water, not all of it reflects off. And then, but as I moved into the foreground, The intensity of the reflections slowly faded, and the color of the water itself came up to prominence. And on that first day, it was so still, there was not a single ripple. And then the following day, it was nearly as still, but there was the hint of a breeze. And it put the most gentle undulation onto the river that I'd seen, and it was just enough to take the reflection of the mountain and the reflection the sky below it and kind of sift the two. It created little striations where the dark color of the mountains. Was striping into the sky, and the sky was stripping up into the mountain. And those two days really taught me that on the river, the only things that can be reflected is those elements. And when they were a mirror, they're in a continuous, you know, very understandable digestible form. But as the ripples get stronger and stronger and stronger, it's taking that progression of mountain to sky, sky fading off to water. Dicing it into like smaller and smaller little pieces and changing the shapes. But those are the colors that, or those are only visual elements that you're dealing with. And so on a strip, for instance, like day four, and then again here on day seven. The knowledge of what the river is doing allowed me to pick out a little more precisely what's happening within this more turbulent, complex wave pattern. You can see the deep reflection that comes from the buildings. Diced up into many, many little segments that carry all the way down to the foreground, but they'll only appear surrounded by a halo of the brightest part of the sky, which is the low part of sky just above the horizon. When I'm painting it, I can then develop a recipe around that knowledge and say, okay, I'm gonna do a big, big, open, broad patches of bright white, or the brightest reflection color that I'm using on that particular day. And then I can mix my darkest reflection color and put little stripes within those spaces. In reality, when you're looking at the real water, that stuff dances fast enough that it's pretty difficult to tease out that that's what's going on. Especially as it starts to get more and more and choppy. At some point it's gonna get so choppy that that will not be visible whatsoever. Like the little black dashes will be so small in and of themselves that you just can't see them at all anymore. So it's only in this kind of middle range where it's like medium choppy, where you still have this clear remnant of what a. A glassy day would have looked like, but it's being mixed together and it hasn't been mixed together so much that it's just blurred out. Sure
Speaker 3 [00:15:24] How do you feel today in comparison to how you felt the first day and you talked about how you feel now?
Ryan Oakes [00:15:35] Do you mean the first day that picked up the paint on this painting? The first strip of this painting, as with many paintings, tends to go very quickly. You've got, you know, both sides of the strip are open. You can pull paint strokes off either side. You don't have to, one side doesn't have to be neatly tucked up against the strip before it. And so often the first strip will go very quick. In these pieces, we're exploring the interplay between time and space. We're doing it in a realm of pure chance, where you start on whatever day you start, you don't know what weather is coming, and you just take whatever progression of weather you get. So on day one, the realm of possibilities is wide open, and you have absolutely no idea. You start on day two, then you'll just start with on day 1. This is how we're gonna process it.
Speaker 3 [00:16:36] Yeah, what he said.
Ryan Oakes [00:16:40] On day one, the realm of possibilities is wide open. You have no idea where the piece is gonna go. So there's this excitement to that. And then on the first day, you begin to lock down what will stay fixed. And as each additional day is added, you begin solidify this rolling of the dice, this element of chance that we've. Structured the work around. So now we're on day eight, nine, sorry, we're on day nine and it's starting to congeal into a more solidified form. Like the possibility space is shrinking. Yeah, so on day one, you know, you wanna make that first trip feel complete in and of itself and we had these very expressive clouds. Really sort of windblown, swooping clouds. And we also have the Statue of Liberty. And so the Statues of Liberty is a figure is making this gesture, holding up this torch. And then the clouds, kind of miraculously, happen to be making the counter gesture, a sort of like contrapposto to the Statute of Liberty doing this, and the clouds are doing that. And we wanted that motif to then have implications as it went through the rest of the piece. With whatever other cloudscapes came along. And we feel we were more or less able to maintain it for at least a good half the painting. So the sort of echo of those two motions played out. And then we hit the central strip, which we had positioned to be on the solstice of the calendar year. And now we're on the backside, finishing up, you know, as the buildings get to be lower, they enter into the more historic city. They're a little shorter as they approach the Brooklyn Bridge, and then the final thing that will take place is the Brooklyn bridge itself will pick up again and exit across the side of the piece. We're sort of, you know, we're still molding this overall like sort of energy passage from one day to the next. And as your variable is to get fewer. You also have, you're trying to make tertiary decisions which tie everything else together. Yeah. So it's kind of like dual thinking processes. Great. So Marion was asking about if there's moments when you're working on the piece, it's going on and on and if you come back to it and you think, oh man, I'm really liking what's happening here, or to the contrary, you come to it and you say, oh, man, oh, it's not going well. Um, so, I would wager, so there's some of both of course, um, with this piece in particular Trevor may have a different opinion. The cloud scape in the central strip has been bugging me a lot. The way the clouds sort of stack together and they're very exaggerated banding and the banding goes like side to side across the strip. So it's kind of like, you know, it's not like a motif that really travels vertically. It's more of this like, yeah, Ron calls it the pancake stack. Pancake stack of clouds. And it's probably the brightest clouds in the whole piece and some of the loudest form, the striping. It's been catching my eye repeatedly and I'm telling myself, as well as Trevor, that we're gonna finish out the piece, we're going to see how things continue to work together, the different weathers of each days. But we may be wanting to double back to the central strip and fine tune some things in the clouds. Maybe knock out some of the bright whites, soften some of banding, we'll see. And you know, I'm not saying that arbitrarily either because on that day when the clouds were being painted, it was much more milky. It was, I mean, the clouds changed throughout the day. So you have different like little vocabularies that you can choose from. Earlier in the day on that central strip, it was like a sort of a smoky wash of dark sky at the base of the, you know, just above the city. And then it opened up to more fluffy clouds, which opened up the blue skies. The way it was rendered, it did reflect how the clouds also were at a time during that day. But it's, you notice it's more of like kind of black and white, brightly lit, dark, brightly lit dark, brightly dark bands. I sort of have earmarked that we're going to loop back around and scrutinize the central strip once the painting is done.
Speaker 3 [00:21:29] So there's precision and there's interpretation.
Ryan Oakes [00:21:34] Yes, I think another way of phrasing what Ryan is talking about is early on it's possible to have a little bit of anxiety about because you're only putting in a little piece of the composition at a time and you have no idea what the rest is going to play out like. That sense of the unknown can be a little bit nerve-wracking. I think that generally you just take what you get, it's about an element of chance. You can come back and do a painting again and each composition is going to be standing in its own posture based on what the cloud relationships are and the color scape in that particular piece and that's what makes the series fun. Towards the end of a painting. You can see the whole thing coming together. And there is a little bit of, especially on the very last day, there's an ability to, with more secondary and tertiary decisions, either resolve energy currents which have occurred in the beginning of the painting or not. So it ends up being a little bit of a... It's a slightly different mindset of like, the future is wide open, anything could occur, it doesn't matter. Like, don't even worry so much about what's happening now, because we have no idea how it's going to affect, how it's gonna interact with what comes later. Yeah. And then when- there's sort of like a handoff from one strip to the next. And so we're talking about the arrangement of the clouds. If you have the energy currents in one strip really going in one direction, and then another strip comes along, you know, it's a blue day, it is a cloudy day, its a partly cloudy day. Whatever the vocabulary is of that weather condition, that's what you work with. But let's say it's partly cloudy today, you have clouds which are appearing at different times and different places in the sky. So you have some latitude about where you choose to place the clouds within your two section of painting. You have a very small amount of latitude, though. Yeah, a small amount. Whatever area you're painting, you paint it like that. And then you move up the sky. And whatever's there, you can paint it. You move up to the sky, and whatever's there, and you paint. So a sky might occur over roughly an hour and a half. So as the clouds are being created or blowing past, there's a little bit of happenstance to what you actually get. And in that there's also a little bit of ability. Respond to a compositional Yeah, but so we'll we'll try and take some note of what was going on in this trip prior and have the clouds Fit in some way not not not like I'm gonna slightly object to that. Okay Ryan likes to try to do that. I'm not as much a fan of doing that And then that leads to a lot of conversations, which is great. That's the dialog. Yeah.
Speaker 4 [00:25:18] Conversations. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 5 [00:25:20] It's really calm, respectful, Conversing. Diplomatic conversation.
Ryan Oakes [00:25:27] No, but you know, it's like you could have, you know. I don't know, like, something's going this way and then the next piece cancels it out. But the reason that happens. Versus augments the directionality. The reason that happen is because of wind direction. No, I understand. So it's, like. I can't imitate. There's an element of chance, and we always work with what we get. We never say we're going to skip a day because we want a sunny day coming up next. But within that, there's room for discussion.
full interview_oakes twins_11.mp4
Speaker 1 [00:00:00] So, how does it feel being young?
Trevor Oakes [00:00:03] Being done, it feels, you know, you finally see all the pieces of the picture come together. When these paintings are started, it feels a bit like reading a suspense novel. Cause you don't know what weather's gonna come and you just paint each day for whatever it is. And you don't know. Narrative plot or how the composition will play out over the course of the painting and with each new strip another piece of the puzzle falls into place and eventually the picture starts to emerge and now on the last day it's like you can you can finally see it. There's a form factor which comes into play. Because prior to now, the canvas is always. Is always asymmetrical. Like the strips are leaning that way and then they straighten up and then start to lean this way. And when you add that last strip and the overall perimeter of the canvas becomes symmetrical, there's also something about, like it has a sense of completion.
Speaker 1 [00:01:19] Brian, how is it for you to be young?
Trevor Oakes [00:01:23] This has been a long project, this has been an overhaul. We've been out here every single day, long days. Because we targeted the solstice as the middle strip, it means we've had plenty of hours of daylight, but it also means that we're kicking off 9 30 p.m. Most days. So to get to the end is uh It's a good sense of completion. And there's, you get to feel the overall energy flow within the piece and kind of analyze what you got, what you've got from all these chances of weather that transpired over the painting. I feel pretty satisfied with the arrangements of clouds and the juxtaposition of days. I mean, you really never know how it's gonna turn out until the final day. And this is a. The painting doesn't make me feel like we need to double back and tweak anything. I feel like it landed in a place which is satisfying.
Speaker 1 [00:02:22] Is it in your gut? How does it feel to be killed?
Trevor Oakes [00:02:28] Well, it feels great to be finished. It's also, this is the first time we've painted from this location on the Brooklyn Pier and we definitely want to come back to make more pieces from here. We feel like we've discovered a new spot which has a bunch of kind of resonating features that speak well to each other and it would be nice to make a little series from here For example, you've got the Statue of Liberty on one side. The Brooklyn Bridge on the other side, those were built around the same time. So they're kind of two historical pieces of New York bracketing the composition. We just painted the Brooklyn Bridge today, and you've got the two archways, and the scale of those, when you kind of look back and forth across to the Statue of Liberty is like, this little figure of the Statues of Liberty could kind of like thread through the archways. This sort of like, like a negative space to a positive space, positive figurine. So there seems to be little like playful scale bits that would have worked out. Another aspect regarding the Statute of Liberty. That which I like is the city, the city is so suggestive of people, but there's no actual people in the architecture there. But the Statue of Liberty is this little figure, this little human figure that's, yeah, that's mixed within the architectural landscape. Yeah, yeah. It's the first time a figure has landed in one of these paintings that has slices of time. Yeah. Um, yeah.
Speaker 3 [00:04:04] What's it like, speaking of people, having this experience of so many people, including the mayor of New York, come up when you otherwise probably don't have anyone coming by in Hudson? Did that affect the process, or did that mean something to you?
Trevor Oakes [00:04:20] Yeah, so this series was established up the river about 50 miles, where we're looking across the Hudson River to the city of Beacon and the Harriman mountain range. And we really kind of packaged the whole idea there and worked out the concept of this series. And then we've gotten the idea road ready and brought it down here to Brooklyn. This is the first piece from Brooklyn. So the biggest difference is that out here intermixed with tons of people, the general public, that comes and goes along the pier. And that aspect has been a really fun and nice addition. There's been, we've had tons of conversations with people, ran into people that we haven't seen for years, serendipitous. Meetings, yeah, serendipitous ideas that seem to have congealed potential new projects. One of these, for example, is a couple days ago, it was the 4th of July, and we were standing out here, they were going to do the fireworks, and, um, we're working towards the evening, and someone, a gentleman comes up and says, so what is it that you guys are doing here? And we turn and chat with him, as we've done with many, many people. And it turns out to be the mayor of New York City. So the new mayor, Eric Adams. And so this was pretty surprising, you know, he had a whole little security detail with him. He had a photographer. He asked questions like anyone else was really invested, really kind of engaged with the piece. And towards the end of the conversation. There's a series of these pieces, there's about 10 of them. I would really like to take all 10 and display them in City Hall. For people to come see. For, yeah. So, I mean, that was a... That was a, the odds of that, the odd of that interaction were crazy. Yeah. That, that wouldn't have happened up the river where we're painting at a private yard. Right, so, so up on the Hudson, we are in the wilderness. Nobody comes by. Down here on the Brooklyn Pier. It's the opposite situation. There's so many chance encounters. And a few days ago we had, the odds of this, I still can't even, can't, can even imagine it. We were on day 10, just painted day 10. It was towards the evening. And a gentleman steps up next to me and very politely asks, is this like, what's going on here? He explains the painting. I turn and I see on his breast pocket, it says. New York City mayor, Eric Adams. Turns out it's the mayor. And he asks several questions, which we chat for a while. At the end of the conversation, he says, I would love to take this painting and display it in City Hall, among other works of yours, for people to see. And it was the same day that I had painted City Hall. One building among many on the Manhattan skyline, but nonetheless, the day that I painted City hall, the mayor came out, tapped me on the shoulder and said, I would to display this painting in City hall. It's crazy.
Ryan Oakes [00:07:54] That's great. It felt...
Trevor Oakes [00:07:57] It felt, it felt like... It felt like the type of thing that would happen in a small town. Yeah.
Ryan Oakes [00:08:11] Alright, did you want to say anything?
Trevor Oakes [00:08:13] I have one other...
Ryan Oakes [00:08:14] Yeah, let's let's.
Trevor Oakes [00:08:15] Just riff on perception.
Ryan Oakes [00:08:17] Yeah, we're going to do that, but first why don't we get our, I want a couple of things. Yeah, go ahead. I'm Trevor, I'm Ryan, Trevor Oakes, Ryan Oakes and we are artists, painters, whatever you want to say, but it's just got to be one or two words.
Trevor Oakes [00:08:30] I am Trevor Oakes. And I'm Ryan Oakes, and we are artists and twin brothers. And we collaborate. This is day 11, and were done. Yep, painting is finished. Wanna say the same thing? This is Day 11, and the painting is finish. I don't know if that's gonna work or not.
Speaker 3 [00:08:53] How do you know? It's kind of far away, isn't it? I'm sorry. No, you're OK. Let's stay back. OK. I'll just put it this way.
Trevor Oakes [00:09:02] This is uh, this is day 11 and we have finished the painting. Yep, everything is wrapped up.
Ryan Oakes [00:09:11] So here's my question, you probably have been thinking about it, right, over the course of the 11 days you've been painting. You've probably been thinking about the patient. Now that you're done, does it take a while for your brains to move on to whatever the next thing is?
Trevor Oakes [00:09:36] Let's think. So, does it take a while to move on to the next thing? As soon as you finish, you know, you haven't seen the piece yet. It's only once it's completed that you actually get to digest and process what you've got. I feel like we move immediately to the next piece. We're finishing this piece today, and then we're gonna go make another one within the week. So we'll just sort of dive right into that. We'll continue to reflect on this piece and really digest what happened within this piece over the course of the next week, two weeks, three weeks, month, you know. Yeah. Thank you. Well, I'm executing the painting, but I'm also, in many ways, a spectator to it, because I don't know what's coming, and because each day is... Because we paint... We'll be right back. Because we paint every day for whatever it is, it means you have to remain spontaneous and nimble and responsive. And that keeps it fun. That keeps it exciting because every single day you're inventing a new recipe of strokes.
Speaker 1 [00:11:10] Thank you.
Trevor Oakes [00:11:13] I'm a spectator to how those to-
Speaker 1 [00:11:15] to
Trevor Oakes [00:11:19] developed the recipe of strokes, but I'm also a spectator to see how that recipe plays out. And even on the day that you've done it, you don't really know how it's going to live in time. So over the course of the next month, you really digest kind of what...
Speaker 1 [00:11:31] Right
Trevor Oakes [00:11:35] As you're painting things, you're paying attention to, you know, you have the first strip, then the second strip, then the third strip, and so you're seeing how the elements relate. Sort of reading from left to right. Once it's all said and done, you can read it from right to left. You can read from top to bottom. Like elements that happened on the last day could relate to elements that was happening on the second day. And so there's all these sort of new cross pollinations which come out over time.
Ryan Oakes [00:12:07] And now you can see.
Trevor Oakes [00:12:09] Yeah, so and and and now we can see them and yeah start to reflect and digest where exactly the energy currents went Yeah, like like you might the first thing you see in the painting might be something which happened on the 10th day Where's like up until that point you've been always focusing on what happened on? The first second third day because that's just what you had first Yeah, that's where it feels like a suspense novel because you don't you don't know what the plot is gonna be You don't know how the plot Is going to unfold you don't know how to composition is gonna play out across the frame and that picture is never gonna be complete until the last final puzzle piece falls in place. Right, so we chose this scene because we thought there was a pretty good melody to how the skyline moved from flat with a Statue of Liberty to spiking at the beginning of the financial district and then running across these skyscrapers and kind of decrescendo towards the Brooklyn Bridge and then crescendo off the end with the Brooklyn bridge exiting the side of the piece. Within that sort of melody structure, how the weather plays across it, and what pieces of clouds interact with what other pieces of cloud is, you know, it unfolds as you paint.
Ryan Oakes [00:13:23] So, okay, so you want to talk about what you spoke about about the camera.
Trevor Oakes [00:13:28] So this drawing painting device machine that we've created. It falls in a lineage of other optical tools, which have been used throughout history to sort of aid artists in determining how to place objects, the relative scale of things, how things appear to shrink as they recede from the eye, from the vantage point. And all that kind of like, the sort of optical reality of how the world looks to our eyes. There's three different methods throughout history that, well, there's three strictly optical methods throughout our history that artists have used. They are the camera lucida, I'm sorry. They are, the concave mirror lens, like a shaving mirror, which can be used to project an image onto a piece of paper or a canvas. And then the lens, these are glass. It with a camera obscura, that's similar to our modern-day camera. And then the camera Lucida, which is like a little prism that kind of refracts an image and you can see through it to your paper, and also the scene in front of you kind of refracted within it. Those three optical tools happen to land on a 200-year increment, so the concave the mirror lens, the spacing between them.
Ryan Oakes [00:14:54] Maybe you have, meaning when they appeared on the scene.
Trevor Oakes [00:14:57] Like, yeah, so...
Ryan Oakes [00:14:59] We just don't understand this. Two hundred years later, the camera is going to appear about the same.
Trevor Oakes [00:15:05] The invention of those three tools happened to be spaced by 200 years relative to each other. So the- It's almost like an even beat. Yeah, so the- Every 200 years. The concave mirror lens is 1400s. The glass lens, the camera obscura is in 1600s. And then the camera Lucy does in the 1800s. Our method is, it's another optical tool. It utilizes your internal optics, your two eyes and how they work together in the brain. It utilizes these internal optics to kind of see a real space and plot it onto a page or a canvas. It's interesting that this was invented in the early 2000s. So we have yet another 200-year gap at another optical tool. It's like a pendulum swing. Every 200 years, a new optical tool pops out. It's a little surprising that our method has not been a known method before. Because it utilizes the optics that you're born with. And it could have, say, predated all of these other external technologies so it's yeah it's surprising it's not been done before When we came up with it, a number of people were saying, you should get that patented. And we looked into it, you only have one year from the date of invention. So we looked in to it back then and ended up applying for a patent. We were given a patent on the first round. And so for us, the reason we did that was to see if there was prior art, if it really was a new idea. We're not planning on enforcing the patent or telling anyone they couldn't do this method. In fact, we would encourage people to do so. But just to see if there really was, if it really was you know, something which hadn't been done before.
Ryan Oakes [00:17:01] All right, so Trevor you wanted to talk about
Trevor Oakes [00:17:05] Yeah, riff riff on perception. With these paintings, we decided to... Each day for whatever the weather looks like. The question then becomes, well, that's the only thing I have to say. The question then becomes... So I'm trying to, like, lead into it. Yeah.
Ryan Oakes [00:17:36] Take your time. It's fine. We're quiet now.
Trevor Oakes [00:17:40] Yeah. See you in a moment. These paintings explore the interplay between time and space. And we decided to do that by painting whatever the weather conditions are so you get a sort of even beat of days transpiring across the landscape. The question then becomes, how do you differentiate the light environments from one day to the next? And if you actually measure the quantity of light that's in the air from a sunny day to a cloudy day, you find that there's a tremendous difference. The quantity of that light. For example, a few years back we turned our curved diesel into a pinhole camera. We wrapped it in black foil, mounted a little pinhole lens and a bottle cap at the center of the curve, and we would use a light meter to measure how much light was in the air and then we would use that number to calculate what our exposure time needed to be. This camera had an extremely prolonged exposure time because the pole is so on it. This is a film was so long. So on a sunny day, we could expose a photograph in about six minutes time. And on a cloudy day, it would take us two hours to expose it, even four hours. So you realize there's like a 40-fold, roughly 20, 40- fold difference in the quantity of light on a Sunday day versus the quantity light on cloudy day. But your eye is, human eye is so good at acclimating to different light levels. It adjusts pretty quickly. And you can tell that it's a little bit brighter on a sunny day and a little dimmer on a cloudy day, but you don't realize there's a 20 to 40-fold difference. So when I had to decide how am I gonna contend, when I'm painting it, how am gonna content with these changing light levels and how is that gonna appear in the painting? And I decided to paint, through discussion, we decided to paint it the way that it appears to the eye and not the way it would appear to a light meter. You're then left with the decisions of mixing color and precisely mixing color so that all of the shades within a given day. Situated correctly relative to the shades for all the other days. Hopefully, when the painting is done, you'll be able to see the subtle shifts in light environment from one day to the next. To expand that slightly more, or the way that that's done, or the one of the ways that we've done that is on a sunny day, the brightest highlight, say the highlight on a cloud at the top of the sky. Brighter than the brightest highlight on a cloudy day, but somewhat counterintuitively, on a dim day, the darkest dark, which is often the foreground of the water, the darkest is also not quite as dark as it would have been on a sunny day. So on a Sunday, the brightest bright to the darkest dark might be a range this wide. On a dimday, the range is gonna fall to there. In this painting, I've painted it with the two ranges almost being nested within one another, whereas a light meter would take the sunny range would be here, and the dim range would here, and the two wouldn't even be relating to one another. So anyways, we've painted the way that it appears, perceptually, just taking a very close assessment each day of the exact hues and the range of hues. The hope is that when the painting is done, this passage of days will depict a sense of time. We perceive time becomes apparent to us through change. Space, especially the solid objects within space, have this relative permanence. They endure through time without changing.
Ryan Oakes [00:22:06] Right, see you next week.
Speaker 1 [00:22:11] Thank you very much.
Ryan Oakes [00:22:24] People's boundaries are lacking, and everybody's different, people are afraid to look at you.
Speaker 1 [00:22:30] Yeah, yeah, yeah
Speaker 3 [00:22:33] What's that? Chopper's here for the event, I'm sure.
Speaker 1 [00:22:41] Oh, okay.
Trevor Oakes [00:22:55] Doing where you were. Yeah, probably only like like like two or three more sentences. Okay, so time becomes apparent to us through change, whereas space, especially the solid objects within space, endure through time and don't change it, don't change as much. So with these pieces, we're hoping to talk about that connection. Transpiring over over space and the relative permanence of space versus the transients of time. Yeah, yeah, exactly.
