Soon after the book's publication in 1982, artist David Hockney read Lawrence Weschler's Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees: A Life of Contemporary Artist Robert Irwin and invited Weschler to his studio to discuss it, initiating a series of engrossing dialogues, gathered here for the first time. Weschler chronicles Hockney's protean production and speculations, including his scenic designs for opera, his homemade xerographic prints, his exploration of physics in relation to Chinese landscape painting, his investigations into optical devices, his taking up of watercolor—and then his spectacular return to oil painting, around 2005, with a series of landscapes of the East Yorkshire countryside of his youth. These conversations provide an astonishing record of what has been Hockney's grand endeavor, nothing less than an exploration of "the structure of seeing" itself.

Lawrence Weschler, a staff writer for twenty years at the New Yorker, is the Director of the New York Institute of the Humanities at New York University and Artistic Director of the Chicago Humanities Festival.

"Lawrence Weschler is one of the most deliriously entertaining writers alive. He does what the best artists and writers should do: he makes you see the world anew."—Dave Eggers, editor of McSweeney's and author of What Is the What

"Weschler guides and entertains the reader at every turn."—John Walsh, Director Emeritus, J. Paul Getty Museum