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"Luminous Art & Design :: Art & Artists"
M.C. Escher :: Biography and Books"
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M.C. Escher (1898-1972) was a Dutch graphic artist known for his brain-teasing lithographs and woodcuts with impossible structures, multiple perspectives and optical illusions. His works create new views of the relationship of time and space.
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Maurits Cornelis Escher (1898-1972) was a Dutch graphic artist that was known for his mind-bending prints of impossible structures or impossible perspectives. His work made him famous and still millions of people around the world are amazed by his art. During his lifetime, he made 448 lithographs, woodcuts and wood engravings and over 2000 drawings and sketches. He is most famous for his impossible structures, but many of his early works were realistic pieces of art.
Escher’s work is playing with architecture, perspective and space and creates bizarre optical illusions. Staircases which seem to ignore gravity and are connected in impossible angles (as ‘Ascending and Descending’). Two-dimensional images that appear to be three-dimensional (as ‘Reptiles’). Tessellations: figures that are interlocking, repeated or blend into each other and continuously cover the surface(as Metamorphosis III, which is wide enough to cover all the walls in a room, and then loop back onto itself). A single scene from two or more points of view at the same time (as ‘High and Low’). Infinite circles of figures that diminish in size as they spiral into or recede from a point in the middle of a circular frame (as ‘Circle Limit I – IV’).
Young M.C. Escher or Mauk as people called him that time, was a poor student and his understanding of mathematics was only visual and intuitive. In 1919, he entered the School for Architectural and Decorative Arts in Haarlem and followed the graphic arts curriculum. After two years he left school. He had gained enough experience and had become a very accomplished printer and his teacher encouraged him to start to look for professional work.
In the 1920s, Escher traveled through Italy and Spain and was deeply impressed by the landscape of The Abruzzi mountains and Italian countryside, and architecture of the Alhambra, a fourteenth-century Moorish castle in Granada, Spain. During this decade, Escher made drawings and sketches to use later for various printouts of lithographs and/or woodcuts and wood engravings.
In the 1950s, MC Escher started to make his famous visual riddles and drew the attention of scientist as well as the public. In an article in 1951, he was described as: ‘a remarkable and original artist who was able to depict the poetry of the mathematical side of things in a most striking way.’ He was awarded the Knighthood of the Order of Orange Nassau in 1955, which resulted in many commissioned works of art for dignitaries around the world.
Escher preferred to work with techniques that involved removing surface such as lithographs and woodcuts. And for prints of interlocking figures, he used the same block to print in two different colors at an angle of 180 degrees. In order to create more contrast in his prints, he also made a few mezzo tints that are now considered to be his masterpieces.
Escher’s work was of interest to mathematicians and psychologists and created new views of the relationship of time and space. His work was very popular with his public and much reproduced. He never encouraged any interpretations of his work, which is not symbolic, but symbolic, a ‘pictorial representation of intellectual understanding’.
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