MC Escher’s world
Some time ago I was admiring one of MC Escher’s prints showing a village perched on a cliffside in Italy and went looking for it on Google Earth. I subsequently discovered that, before Escher started metamorphosising birds into fish and building impossible staircases, he’d spent many years in Italy and came up with amazing pictures of almost everywhere he went. The surprising thing is that so many of these stunning images are true to life.
My further reading about a man who’d first impressed me when I was in high school resulted in a 68-piece Google Earth tour fully illustrated with his drawings. Following is some of the text and images used.
In a way, MC Escher – who died 35 years ago come March 27 – just happened to come along at the right time. When his mesmerising work first became globally known in the 1960s it found admirers it in a generation of young people who, if not actually eyewitness to such constructions in their own minds thanks to hallucinogenic drugs, discovered a contrary art form almost made for them. Stirred by rebelliousness, Alice had made another trip through the looking glass, and this was what she found.
On the other hand, Escher was no hippie. If occasionally playful, he was sobre, conservative, studious, neat, pragmatic, scientific, hard-working, a devoted family man and, because the fascists had made his own life difficult, accepting of the need for war. (Mussolini was at his first child’s christening, but that had to do with local celebrity, not ideology.) See the rest.
