I tend to be fairly certain that everybody has heard of M.C. Escher at this point in history, especially if you’re into art. If you haven’t, I strongly urge you to take the dive into who he is immediately. Stop reading this, and click on this link right the fuck now!
I could write a book about Escher’s work. He’s done it all, even though folks mostly think of tessellating patterns when they hear his name. By 1930 he was illustrating intensely beautiful landscapes - Castrovalva is one of his most famous ones. The 30s saw the end of his paintings from his period spent in Italy, and produced one of his most famous pieces, Hand with Reflecting Sphere. The 30s were also where his tessellations began to take shape, and he printed one tripped out pattern after another. One of the most well known of this is titled, Day and Night.
It was actually in the 50s that architectural explorations began, known as his “impossible constructions” series. But wait, that’s not all. In the 60s, he started leaning into some wildly different styles as his journey into surrealism brought him to a realm of abstraction exploring all manner of tessellations again.
He never really stopped making prints of these crazy patterns, and he never really stopped diving into different corners of math and art. And what’s even crazier, and I find to be a lesser known fact about him, is that he was also very deeply into linocuts, woodcuts, and manual wood engraving! Here’s his last piece he made before he died, a woodcut print titled Snakes:
I really hope Escher’s work brings you some joy, and you can enjoy all the tripped out varieties he has to offer in his body of work. He is one of my bigger influences when it comes to my obsession with understanding what it means to be a geometer, and how the mathematical nature of the universe around us can influence aesthetics in all forms of art.
Including generative art. As I spin up the engines for Iterative, I am finding myself going back to the pre-digital masters of these realms of art, to find inspiration, and stay grounded on a conceptual level. After all, surrealism can be born of entropy just as much as pure order.
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And if you’re into what I’m doing with math and art, make sure you’re following Iterative as well. A whole lot of really cool shit is about to drop!