Twins' singular vision of how humans see world

August 03, 2008|By Charles Storch, TRIBUNE REPORTER

They have two sets of eyes but one vision.

Identical twins Ryan and Trevor Oakes have shared a fascination with how the world is experienced and interpreted through sight since their childhood in Boulder, Colo. Their fascination developed into an exploration while they attended the same art school and into a preoccupation after they set up a studio in the cramped New York City apartment they share. Other trained visual artists are familiar with the behavior of light on objects, but few are as absorbed with achieving fidelity to what and how the eye sees as these focused 26-year-olds.

They've developed a drawing method that exploits binocular vision -- by which the human brain fuses into one the separate images of two eyes -- and employs a concave paper shaped like the interior of the eye. Their urban landscapes are highly detailed and less distorted than an image drawn on a flat surface or filtered through a camera lens, but maintain the chancy look of an image drawn freehand.

"It is a tangible document of what's happening in the visual cortex of the brain," said Ryan Oakes, as he and his brother stood along the 600 block of South Michigan Avenue on a late July day, pausing from drawing the glass-walled Spertus Institute of Jewish Studies across the street.

But is theirs a practical innovation or a complicated science project?

Drawing attention

The brothers were working here the last month on drawings of local landmarks -- all the while attracting curious stares wherever they set up the unusual easel of their design.

The tall, metal easel has a concave working surface set within a frame. Two rigid arms descend from the top and brace a plaster cap. Trevor Oakes, the better draftsman of the two brothers, sets his head in the cap, which keeps his left eye fixed on the concave drawing while his right eye takes in objects in the distance.

Their Chicago drawings are to be shown this fall in the Spertus. Called "Double Vision," the exhibition is to be the first of the twins' drawing method, how it evolved over four years of experimentation plus earlier sculpture and watercolors. They also are to be here to participate in a panel on linear perspective at "Thinking Big," this fall's Chicago Humanities Festival.

Though he admires the twins' craftsmanship, Lawrence Weschler, the festival's artistic director, has been won over by their single-mindedness, as it were, and depth of scientific inquiry. He has introduced them to, among others, artist David Hockney, neurologist-author Oliver Sacks and Spertus Museum Director Rhoda Rosen. Weschler praised the twins' work as "an investigation, a celebration of a kind of discovery."

For some six centuries, artists have used linear perspective to approximate three-dimensional reality on a two-dimensional surface. Some relied on hand and eye alone; others used optical devices that projected images on a surface that could then be traced. (Hockney caused an uproar in 2001 with his theory that many old masters relied on optical tools.) Those devices required a dark chamber (in Latin, camera obscura), a prism on a stick (camera lucida), mirrors or lenses.


The Oakes twins "have invented a technique for rendering a perspectival view that is without all the apparatus that was once used," said Rosen. "It's extremely detail-oriented, and I love the rigor of it."

Trevor Oakes described the optical maneuver he was using to trace the Spertus facade:

"I look at the building around the paper's edge with my right eye. My left eye is blocked by the paper. When my brain tries to integrate the two images, I see a transparent, ghostlike image of the paper overlaying the image of the building in the distance. I can then trace the location of objects directly onto the paper."

He draws from the edges in. As the rightmost edge is filled in, Ryan cuts it off so Trevor has a new, blank edge with which to work. The finished drawing is a series of vertical strips recombined on a concave backing.

The work is very concentrated; even with training, Trevor can hold a phantom image no longer than 10 minutes. With Ryan surveying site and otherwise assisting, Trevor needed 15 days to complete his drawing of the "Cloud Gate" sculpture in Millennium Park.

They seem to accept that part of the fascination with their work is their twinness.

"People ask us, 'What's it like to be a twin?' I ask them, 'What's it like to be a single?'" said Ryan. "We don't know anything different from having a brother around."