Ryan Oakes and Trevor Oakes: Eleven-Day Paintings

The second gallery features new works by Ryan Oakes and Trevor Oakes, identical twins whose paintings emerge from a singular collaborative practice. Since 2018, the Hudson River has been the focus of the Oakes' most ambitious body of work. Painted from a fixed vantage point overlooking the river in Newburgh, New York, the series is executed on three-dimensional concave canvases shaped to approximate the spherical geometry of human vision, or more simply, the curvature of of an eyeball. Beginning in 2004, the Oakes have pioneered a distinctive method of painting on curved canvases, investigating perception, space, and light. In this series, they introduce a fourth dimension: time. Each painting is made entirely en plein air over eleven consecutive days. Beginning each morning and working until sundown, the artists complete a single two-inch-wide vertical section, recording the precise atmospheric conditions of that day. Freezing rain, dense fog, brilliant sunlight, shifting winds, and still water become embedded within a single image. The completed painting is not a frozen instant, but a chronology—a landscape accumulated through time. Seen together, these works reveal the tension between permanence and transience. Geography remains fixed while weather, light, and season continually transform it. In dialogue with the nineteenth-century paintings presented in the adjoining gallery, the Oakes extend the Hudson River School's commitment to direct observation into a contemporary meditation on perception, duration, and the passage of time.