Last year I went to see The Amazing World of M.C. Escher at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art.
About the Exhibition
M.C. Escher is one of the great conundrums of modern art. He is an artist whose work is as instantly recognisable as anything by Salvador Dalí, yet his name means little to a British audience. Escher was never affiliated to any group, rarely travelling far from his modest home in the Dutch town of Baarn, and focusing exclusively on graphic art. He was a one-man art movement who created some of the most famous and popular images in modern art, yet he remains a complete enigma.
This exhibition features over 100 prints and drawings spanning his whole career, and is drawn in its entirety from the Geemeentemuseum in The Hague, in the Netherlands, which holds an almost complete set of Escher’s prints. It is also mounted in collaboration with the Escher in Het Paleis, a museum of Escher’s work which opened in the centre of The Hague in 2002.
I have always liked the work of Escher. I like the precision and perfection of it and I learned at the exhibition that this was in part because his brother was a Mathematician and helped him work out the exact calculations for the reflections on the spheres etc. In addition his father had very exacting standards and would point out any flaws in his work and suggest he did it again.
I particularly admire his Metamorposis 1 where the negative spaces between fish gradually morph into black swans.
I included his drawing in my Time and the Viewer drawing.
Time and the Viewer black drawing pen
Time and the Viewer
My homage to Escher; black cats morphing into white swans.
References
My drawing2 blog 