You can see impossible constructions depicted in Escher’s famous “Relativity” piece that depicts people simultaneously ascending and descending stairs in an infinite loop. Third, Escher was fascinated by so-called “impossible constructions” or visual illusions such as the Necker cube and the Penrose triangle that take advantage of quirks of perception and perspective. Or in this piece, Day and Night, a whole landscape shifting: In his woodcut Sky and Water, for example, we see birds becoming fish/fish becoming birds.
These transformations appear most clearly in Escher’s tessellation pieces.
Second, Escher depicted in his work transformation/transmutations where we see one shape becoming another. We see tessellations in Escher works such as these: Honeycombs and interlocking pavement tiles are examples of tessellations. Tessellations, by the way, are the composite result of geometric shapes that are repeated without overlaps or gaps. ( Which reminds me of an article on the advanced geometry of 12-century Islamic art.) Seeing the tile mosaics inspired Escher to use geometric grids as the basis for his art as a way of gaining precision. Let’s take a look.įirst, Escher incorporated tessellations into his work, a technique he picked up in his study of tile mosaics while visiting Alhambra, a Moorish palace in Spain in the early 1920s. Lately I’ve been thinking about what these qualities in Escher’s art have to offer those of us working in music (whether making it or writing about it). Escher’s (1898-1972) drawings and woodcuts because of their precision, their order and symmetry, their use of repetition and optical illusions, and the way they seem to point towards what could be called the infinite. “Are you really sure that a floor can’t also be a ceiling?” “My work is a game, a very serious game.” Escher deceives the viewer’s eye, time and time again.“Order is repetition of units. Does a residual shape of a bird count as a bird? And if so, at what point does this stop? When described in writing, all this seems more complicated than the viewing of the print does, but the viewing of the print is no less complicated. Due to this alternation of shape and residual shape, it is hard to determine how many birds and fish this woodcut contains. The opposite happens when you look downwards, starting from the centre. Looking up from the middle, the white shapes open themselves up and gradually lose their fish-shaped silhouettes they merge and change into a white sky background in which the birds are flying. The fact that the upper half progresses into the bottom one and vice versa gives rise to a tessellation in which birds become residual shapes to the fish and the other way around. In the last row of each half there are four of them.
Then there is a row with three birds heading right and left and three fish heading right and left. In the next row two birds are flying to the right and two are flying to the left, as do the fish in the corresponding row. Their fish counterparts at the bottom are engaged in the same movement. Viewed from above, the first black bird is flying to the right the second one is flying to the left. In it, all the birds and fish are moving to the right, whereas in II we see them moving in both directions. Six months earlier he produced a woodcut with the same subject: Sky and Water I. Escher, Sky and Water II, woodcut, December 1938Įscher created Sky and Water II in the freezing month of December in 1938, in stark contrast to the beautiful weather we have in the Netherlands today.
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