Research Project Part 1.

(find images and information on an artist you love/are passionate about )

+++M.C. Escher +++

"Good God, I wish I'd learn to draw a little better! How much effort and persistence it costs to try to do it well. [...] Talent and all that are really for the most part just baloney. Any schoolboy with a little aptitude can perhaps draw better than I; but what he lacks in most cases is that tenacious desire to make it reality, that obstinate gnashing of teeth and saying, 'Although I know it can't be done, I want to do it anyway'" (Escher, 1955, [p.1], quoted in Escher, 1989, p.8)

Escher didn't see himself as an "artist" but as a graphic artist with heart and soul (Escher, 1989, p.22)


M.C. Escher became fascinated by the regular Division of the Plane, when he first visited the Alhambra, a fourteen century Moorish castle in Granada, Spain in 1922.
During the years in Switzerland and throughout the Second World War, he vigorously pursued his hobby, by drawing 62 of the total of 137 Regular Division Drawings he would make in his lifetime.
He played with architecture, perspective and impossible spaces... M.C. Escher shows us that reality is wondrous, comprehensible and fascinating.
M.C.Escher Company B.V. (2007)

Symmetry work 66

Magic Mirror 1946 Lithograph

... Yellow and black trails of winged lions are each other's glide reflections.

....the same little animal is born in and emerges from a vertical looking glass. More and more come out of the mirror until at last the whole creature has freed itself from the image. ... Thus two curves processions move on, first in one row, then in two rows, and finally in four rows, moving from left to right and from right to left. They meet in the foreground, lose their three-dimensionality, become flat, and slide together as pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. Together they now form a horizontal plane, a tiled floor, on which stands the looking glass. (Escher, 1989, p.45)

Symmetry work 21

Cycle 1938 Lithograph
Full size image: http://www.mcescher.com/Gallery/switz-bmp/LW305.jpg

... little men in three colors fill the plane. That same motif is the main theme of the ... print. The little man leaves his house and runs down a staircase. On his way down he loses his three dimensionality and arrives, flat and gret, amid white and black fellow creatures. Each of them is simplified into a rhomb. Three rhombs suggest a cube; the cube borders the house, and from the house the little man again appears... (Escher, 1989, p.44)

Belvedere 1958 Lithograph

Additional: http://www.mcescher.com/Downloads/belve2.mpg

He is most famous for his so-called impossible structures, such as Ascending and Descending, Relativity, his Transformation Prints, such as Metamorphosis I, Metamorphosis II and Metamorphosis III, Sky & Water I or Reptiles.

M.C.Escher Company B.V. (2007)

Ascending and Descending 1960 Lithograph

Relativity: http://www.mcescher.com/Gallery/back-bmp/LW389.jpg

Dewdrop 1948 Mezzotint

Eye 1946 Mezzotint

To the left you see the enlargement of a leaf of a succulent plant; its actual size was about one inch.... The tiny drop of water acts not only as a mirror but also as a lens, for throught it one sees the magnified structure of the leaf's veins, with bright shimmering air particles trapped between leaf and dewdrop.

On the right a last example of globular reflection: an eye, which is of course my own... It was necessary and logical to portray somebody in the pupil, an observer, reflected in the convex mirror of the eye. I chose the features of Good Man Bones, with whom we are all confronted, whether we like it or not. (Escher, 1989, p.61)

Print Gallery 1956 Lithograph

"Escher considered this to be one of his best pictures. ... an overlap is created of the depicted picture gallery and the world of one of the pictures therein exhibited. Only in an imagined world is such a thing possible." (Locher 2000, p.133)

The M.C. Escher Company B.V., 2007, "The Offical M.C. Escher Website" [online], M.C. Escher Foundation & The M.C. Escher Company B.V, Available from: http://www.mcescher.com/Biography/biography.htm

Escher MC, 1989, Escher on Escher exploring the infinite M.C. Escher, Harry N. Abrams Inc., New York

2000, The Magic of M.C. Escher with an Introduction by J.L.Locher, foreword by W.F.Veldhuysen, Thames & Hudson Ltd, London