Escher shows us that reality is wondrous, comprehensible and fascinating.Įxamining one of his woodcuts, Sky & Water I (left above), we see fish in the sea and as you go up, the space between the fish transform into black ducks. In his work we recognize his keen observation of the world around us and the expressions of his own fantasies. His art continues to amaze and wonder millions of people all over the world. He played with architecture, perspective and impossible spaces. Many of these sketches he would later use for various other lithographs and/or woodcuts and wood engravings. During these 11 years, Escher would travel each year throughout Italy, drawing and sketching for the various prints he would make when he returned home. They settled in Rome, where they stayed until 1935. After finishing school, he traveled extensively through Italy, where he met his wife Jetta Umiker. He was born in Leeuwarden, the Netherlands, as the fourth and youngest son of a civil engineer. Escher illustrated books, designed tapestries, postage stamps and murals. Like some of his famous predecessors, - Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Dürer and Holbein-, M.C. Escher, during his lifetime, made 448 lithographs, woodcuts and wood engravings and over 2000 drawings and sketches. What made Escher's pictures so appealing was that he used tessellations to create optical illusions. 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. He created visual riddles, playing with the pictorially logical and the visually impossible. His art is enjoyed by millions of people all over the world. Maurits Cornelis Escher (1898-1972) is a graphic artist known for his art tessellations. "Designs featuring animals, birds, etc, which can fill the page, without over-lapping, to form a pattern." "A collection of plane figures that fills the plane with no overlaps and no gaps." "To form into a mosaic pattern, as by using small squares of stone or glass." Hunt using an irregular pentagon (shown on the right)."A tessellation is created when a shape is repeated over and over again covering a plane without any gaps or overlaps." Another spiral tiling was published 1985 by Michael D. The first such pattern was discovered by Heinz Voderberg in 1936 and used a concave 11-sided polygon (shown on the left). Lu, a physicist at Harvard, metal quasicrystals have "unusually high thermal and electrical resistivities due to the aperiodicity" of their atomic arrangements.Īnother set of interesting aperiodic tessellations is spirals. The geometries within five-fold symmetrical aperiodic tessellations have become important to the field of crystallography, which since the 1980s has given rise to the study of quasicrystals. According to ArchNet, an online architectural library, the exterior surfaces "are covered entirely with a brick pattern of interlacing pentagons." An early example is Gunbad-i Qabud, an 1197 tomb tower in Maragha, Iran. The patterns were used in works of art and architecture at least 500 years before they were discovered in the West. Medieval Islamic architecture is particularly rich in aperiodic tessellation. These tessellations do not have repeating patterns. Notice how each gecko is touching six others. The following "gecko" tessellation, inspired by similar Escher designs, is based on a hexagonal grid. By their very nature, they are more interested in the way the gate is opened than in the garden that lies behind it." In doing so, they have opened the gate leading to an extensive domain, but they have not entered this domain themselves. This further inspired Escher, who began exploring deeply intricate interlocking tessellations of animals, people and plants.Īccording to Escher, "Crystallographers have … ascertained which and how many ways there are of dividing a plane in a regular manner. His brother directed him to a 1924 scientific paper by George Pólya that illustrated the 17 ways a pattern can be categorized by its various symmetries. According to James Case, a book reviewer for the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM), in 1937, Escher shared with his brother sketches from his fascination with 11 th- and 12 th-century Islamic artwork of the Iberian Peninsula. The most famous practitioner of this is 20 th-century artist M.C. Escher & modified monohedral tessellationsĪ unique art form is enabled by modifying monohedral tessellations. A dual of a regular tessellation is formed by taking the center of each shape as a vertex and joining the centers of adjacent shapes.
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