This week OBS bring you another incredible artist; continuing our bi-weekly article, we bring you M.C. Escher.M.C. Escher
The youngest son and a sickly child, Escher was placed in a special school when he was seven and failed the second grade. From 1903 until 1918, he attended primary and secondary school and though he excelled at drawing, his grades were generally poor. As an adult he briefly studied architecture, but failed a number of subjects and switched to decorative arts. In 1922, Escher left the school, having gained experience in drawing and woodcuts and traveled through Italy and Spain, where he was impressed by the Italian countryside and the Alhambra in Granada. The same year he met his wife, Jetta Umiker. Escher became a Dutch-Frisian graphic-artist who was best known for his mathematically inspired woodcuts, lithographs and mezzotints when he died on March 27, 1972 in Hilversum, Netherlands.
Escher's first print of an impossible reality was 'Still Life and Street' (1937). His artistic expression was created from images in his mind, rather than directly from observations and travels to other countries. Well known examples of his work also include 'Drawing Hands' (1948), a work in which two hands are shown, each drawing the other.
'Sky and Water', in which light plays on shadow to morph the water background behind fish figures into bird figures on a sky background; and 'Ascending and Descending', in which lines of people ascend and descend stairs in an infinite loop, on a construction which is impossible to build and possible to draw only by taking advantage of quirks of perception and perspective.
He worked primarily in the media of lithographs and woodcuts, though the few mezzotints he made are considered to be masterpieces of the technique. In his graphic art, he portrayed mathematical relationships among shapes, figures and space. Additionally, he explored interlocking figures using black and white to enhance different dimensions. Integrated into his prints were mirror images of cones, spheres, cubes, rings and spirals.
Although Escher did not have mathematical training, his work had a strong mathematical component, and more than a few of the worlds which he drew are built around impossible objects such as the Necker cube and the Penrose triangle. Many of Escher's works employed repeated tilings called tessellations. Escher's artwork is especially well-liked by mathematicians and scientists, who enjoy his use of polyhedra and geometric distortions.
In 1941, Escher wrote his first paper, now publicly recognized, called Regular Division of the Plane with Asymmetric Congruent Polygons, which detailed his mathematical approach to artwork creation. His intention in writing this was to aid himself in integrating mathematics into art. Escher is considered a research mathematician of his time because of his documentation with this paper. In it, he studied color based division, and developed a system of categorizing combinations of shape, color and symmetrical properties. By studying these areas, he explored an area that later mathematicians labeled crystallography.
In 1958, he published a paper called 'Regular Division of the Plane', in which he described the systematic buildup of mathematical designs in his artworks. His early love of Roman and Italian landscapes and of nature led to his interest in the concept of regular division of a plane, which he applied in over 150 colored works. Other mathematical principles evidenced in his works include the superposition of a hyperbolic plane on a fixed 2-dimensional plane, and the incorporation of three-dimensional objects such as spheres, columns and cubes into his works. For example, in a print called 'Reptiles', he combined two and three-dimensional images.
Escher also studied the mathematical concepts of topology. From this knowledge he created 'Waterfall' and 'Up and Down', featuring irregular perspectives similar to the concept of the Möbius strip.
Escher printed 'Metamorphosis I' in 1937, which was a beginning part of a series of designs that told a story through the use of pictures. These works demonstrated a culmination of Escher's skills to incorporate mathematics into art. In Metamorphosis I, he transformed convex polygons into regular patterns in a plane to form a human motif. This effect symbolizes his change of interest from landscape and nature to regular division of a plane.
One of his most notable works is the piece 'Metamorphosis III', which is wide enough to cover all the walls in a room, and then loop back onto itself.
After 1953, Escher became a lecturer at many organizations. A planned series of lectures in North America in 1962 was canceled due to an illness, but the illustrations and text for the lectures, written out in full by Escher, were later published as part of the book Escher on Escher. In July 1969 he finished his last work, a woodcut called 'Snakes', in which snakes wind through a pattern of linked rings which fade to infinity toward both the center and the edge of a circle.
(From wikipedia.com)See more of Escher's work and his bibliography here:
http://openbooksociety.com/article/artist-profile-m-c-escher/
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