If there is one artist whom I would call my superhero, it would be Maurits Cornelius Escher. I find Escher’s art work utterly fascinating, his realistic illusions stir my mind deeply.
“Are you really sure that a floor cannot also be a ceiling?”
This quote by Escher was mind boggling to me, a thought that had never occurred to me before. It made me question reality. Every Escher painting that I have seen has made me look at reality afresh. His painting of impossible objects and transformations (of one life form to another) are deeply inspiring. What is important in them is a sense of continuity and gradual change. This is
what makes the illusion very successful.
Escher, a Dutch graphic artist, lived for 74 years (from 1898 to 1972) and created a wide range of mathematically inspired woodcuts, “lithographs” and “mezzotints”. (I have seen some woodcuts but not these other kinds.) I had the opportunity to visit the Escher Museum in Den Haag when I was 7 years old. I was too young to understand what I saw but it still made an impression on me. Now when I see the same sketches on the Internet, I can appreciate the
visuals, the detail and the concepts they show.
The works of Escher that I love most are:
● Drawing hands
● Relativity
● Reptiles
● Sky and water
They all convey realistic illusions and have a flow in them.
Another aspect of Escher’s work that appeals to me is tessellation. I have seen this only in mathematics, where we can repeat a figure in every direction filling up space completely. Escher uses the idea but at the same time uses transformations so that simple repetition somehow fills space very differently. His tessellations are dynamic, they change minutely from frame to frame thus giving a visual taste of continuity. This is a technique I want to learn.
Escher did not go for portraits, the only ones he did were of himself. He did not paint realistic landscapes or scenes that he saw in daily life. What he did paint was his reflection of external reality, how he saw in his mind’s eye. In this sense, the artist is also present in Escher’s art. I really love the way his mind works, because he dared to think of things that did not exist.
Escher was very confident of his art and did not merge with the crowd. Even when critics did not approve of his style, he stuck to his concepts confidently. I admire the way he followed his own convictions.
Escher’s Relativity is among my greatest favourites in all art. Its structure of the seven staircases and people walking in different directions, creates interesting phenomena. In total the scene defies gravity but each person has their own gravity source. They all seem to go into basements below or the sky up above, which is impossible, but it is difficult to pinpoint what is
wrong. If we look at the painting in detail in small cells, each cell looks normal and the actions in it look realistic. Yet that total effect is different. This again is the sense of continuity that is typical of Escher.
I have not seen any of Escher’s three dimensional works, and would like to explore them. Apparently Escher was also an amateur astronomer who loved to look into deep space. Perhaps if I learn to look through telescopes and see deep space, it will give me artistic ideas as well.
I hope to study Escher in depth and learn how to transform reality in my mind.
Maya Dharmavaram
September 12, 2020
