(Picture courtesy of  Lex Talionis at flickr.com.)

The works of Escher are so easily recognizable, it might be helpful to art post followers to point out that they’re so commonly seen that many do not realize that this is art at all.

The geometric designs have brought our attention to phenomena of the senses, showing us illusion and illustration combined.

Escher’s first print of an impossible reality was Still Life and Street, 1937. His artistic expression was created from images in his mind, rather than directly from observations and travels to other countries. Well known examples of his work include Drawing Hands, a work in which two hands are shown, each drawing the other; Sky and Water, in which light plays on shadow to morph the water background behind fish figures into bird figures on a sky background; and Ascending and Descending, in which lines of people ascend and descend stairs in an infinite loop, on a construction which is impossible to build and possible to draw only by taking advantage ofquirks of perception and perspective.

He worked primarily in the media of lithographs and woodcuts, though the few mezzotints he made are considered to be masterpieces of the technique. In his graphic art, he portrayed mathematical relationships among shapes, figures and space. Additionally, he explored interlocking figures using black and white to enhance different dimensions. Integrated into his prints were mirror images of cones, spheres, cubes, rings and spirals.

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Overall, his early love of Roman and Italian landscapes and of nature led to his interest in the concept of regular division of a plane, which he applied in over 150 colored works. Other mathematical principles evidenced in his works include the superposition of a hyperbolic plane on a fixed 2-dimensional plane, and the incorporation of three-dimensional objects such as spheres, columns and cubes into his works. For example, in a print called “Reptiles“, he combined two and three-dimensional images. In one of his papers, Escher emphasized the importance of dimensionality and described himself as “irritated” by flat shapes: “I make them come out of the plane.”

Escher was wonderfully whimsical, and has made an effect without parallel (you know I can’t help making a pun) in popularizing his vision.  His convoluted creations have become a part of our everyday scene.

(Picture courtesy of williamcromar at flickr.com.)