Millennium Park’s Cloud Gate is irresistible to the hand and eye. We crouch beneath it and play in front of it. We stroke it. We take photos of our warped, stretched bodies reflected in its curved chrome surface. Or we simply stand and watch the sky change in it.
As Trevor drew, Ryan explained. Their tripod apparatus, which they call “the easel,” in a sense allowed Trevor to see through the paper he drew on to the object beyond it being drawn. Normally, our two eyes unite what each sees individually into one picture; but the easel is designed to separate what they see. In this case, Trevor’s left eye saw the paper, his right eye Cloud Gate and the plaza around it.
The easel the Oakeses invented to impose image on paper has forerunners that go back centuries. Their device is the first, however, that requires neither mirrors nor lenses.
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Next came the camera obscura, frequently mentioned in Leonardo da Vinci’s notebooks. The artist sits in a darkened chamber viewing his subject, who is outside the chamber in bright light, through a small open window. Light enters the chamber, is collected on a lens mounted near the artist, and projected upside down onto the opposite wall, where paper or canvas has been set up. This process allows the artist to fix essential details, such as the corners of the eyes, the edges of the nose, and the mouth and ears of a face being painted. Once these parameters are sketched, the artist works from eye, fleshing out a more complete portrait. The concept of the camera obscura was written about by Aristotle in Problemata, as early as 350 BC.
Art historians who think the use of optics is cheating have resisted the Hockney-Falco thesis. But as Hockney notes, “optics do not make marks, only the artist’s hand can do that, and it requires great skill. And optics don’t make drawing any easier either, far from it…. But to an artist six hundred years ago optical projections would have demonstrated a new vivid way of looking at and representing the material world.” Before Hockney, Martin Kemp had reasoned that painters of the time were drawn to science and would have considered it a point of pride to be proficient with optical devices.
The slow steps the brothers have taken toward their understanding of vision and light began with a series of collaborative projects at Cooper Union in New York, the art school the Colorado natives both graduated from in 2004. They began by building a dome of matchsticks, glued together layer by layer, with the red tips forming the shell. “Building that sculpture was the first time we started to think about other entities in nature that shared that spatial structure, the structure of a bunch of rays perpendicular to a sphere,” says Trevor. “And the first things that came to mind were light rays being emitted from a point source, like a lightbulb, which has a spherical burst of rays. And then also, light rays coming into your pupil, condensing back to a point. It was building that structure that really got us to wrap our minds around the science involved, and to start considering the physics of it more specifically.”
Finally came the discovery of the ghost image. Holding his sketchbook waist high and standing directly above a leaf on the ground, Trevor found that when he focused on the sketchbook to draw, a double image of the leaf appeared beyond it, and when he focused on the leaf, a double image of the sketchbook appeared. As he looked down and placed the sketchbook in front of his left eye while looking at the leaf with his right, Trevor’s visual cortex attempted to merge paper and leaf into one image, creating an overlap that allowed him to essentially see through the paper and trace the leaf in detail. “The ghost image was the pivotal realization for what then turned into the method to capture the world in its proportions, scale, and diminishing perspective, exactly as your eyes see,” he says. “This is a way of rendering realism that takes proportion, location, and perspective as a given and automatically gets them right.
10/29-11/30: Sun-Wed 10-5 PM, Thu 10-6 PM, Fri 10-3 PM. The twins will lecture at the exhibit Sun 11/9, 4 PM, as part of the Chicago Humanities Festival. Spertus Institute, 610 S. Michigan, 312-322-1700, spertus.edu. F
