Woodcuts make my head ring like a bell. Something about the intense clarity of the pure black and pure white, interleaved and yet distinct, playing off each other to make portraits, architecture, landscapes, and visual expressions of abstract mathematical forms that have powerful impact from a few steps back and dissolve into geometrical ones and zeros close up. Literally, I feel my face flush as I examine such work, and my head feels packed as if suffering a bad cold.
So it was at the M.C. Escher exhibit at the Currier in Manchester, NH. I was familiar with his later work, but his earlier images were new to me. Up until middle age, much of this Dutch artist's work was representational, often of Italian scenes; then, more or less suddenly, he gave that up for the presentations of abstract mathematical forms that we all know so well: the Belvedere, the endless waterfall, the hands drawing each other and many more.
He started out with brilliant skills in all kinds of printmaking and and with a bold graphic imagination, and never stopped learning all his life, consulting with some of the world's most brilliant mathematicians and physicists to further his explorations. Following the course of the exhibit, we could see him, work after work over time, experimenting with tessellations, metamorphoses, reflections, infinite sequences in two-dimensions and threeo, illusions and impossibilities, each new picture a conceptual advance in the orderly and simultaneous presentation of clashing alternative perspectives: inside vs outside, near vs far away, general vs specific, object vs background.
On the ride back, and over the kitchen since, we talked about what we'd seen: 'Did you notice the...' and 'What about that one...' and each item as if it were a prodigy. Yet, you were formal as man and artist, very precise in planning, producing ('My hand still steady' was one of the blessings he mentioned at the end of his career) and printing.
You wrote: 'It can apparently happen that someone, without much exact learning and will little of the information collected by earlier generations in his head, that such an individual, passing his days like other artists in the creation of more or less fantastical pictures, can one day feel ripen within himself a conscious wish to use his imaginary images to approach infinity as purely and as closely as possible.
'Deep, deep infinity! Quietness. To dream away from the tensions of daily living: to sail over a calm sea at the prow of a ship, toward a horizon that always recedes; to stare at the passing waves and listen to their monotonous soft murmur; to dream away into unconsciousness.
'Anyone who plunges into infinity...needs fixed points, mileposts...' and each of your carefully wrought images speak to both imperatives.
Yet the intellectual brilliance of your last work didn't rock me like some of your earlier, and how, using fine or broad parallel lines or cross-hatching, you created textures or borders. The white streaked hair of Eve over the black shoulder of Adam in your Sixth Day of Creation: I looked and looked to see how you did it. Maybe it's woodcut 101, but visually a challenge to me. And the billows in your Second Day: I feel them viscerally even in memory. And the tender picture of your young wife: how did you vary the thicknesses of your lines to suggest skin and not polished marble? The closer I looked, the more lost I became in your technique, in your careful hand wielding one of woodcutter's tools--lozenge graver, spitsticker, scorper, chisel--moving repetitively but with modulation over the surface of a piece of wood. Then the making of the print so that here it's black, black, black and beyond that exact line, white as white.
You, Mr Escher, quiet and overt as you were, challenged my hand, my eye, my imagination. I came away exhausted and delighted. Thank you.
So it was at the M.C. Escher exhibit at the Currier in Manchester, NH. I was familiar with his later work, but his earlier images were new to me. Up until middle age, much of this Dutch artist's work was representational, often of Italian scenes; then, more or less suddenly, he gave that up for the presentations of abstract mathematical forms that we all know so well: the Belvedere, the endless waterfall, the hands drawing each other and many more.
He started out with brilliant skills in all kinds of printmaking and and with a bold graphic imagination, and never stopped learning all his life, consulting with some of the world's most brilliant mathematicians and physicists to further his explorations. Following the course of the exhibit, we could see him, work after work over time, experimenting with tessellations, metamorphoses, reflections, infinite sequences in two-dimensions and threeo, illusions and impossibilities, each new picture a conceptual advance in the orderly and simultaneous presentation of clashing alternative perspectives: inside vs outside, near vs far away, general vs specific, object vs background.
On the ride back, and over the kitchen since, we talked about what we'd seen: 'Did you notice the...' and 'What about that one...' and each item as if it were a prodigy. Yet, you were formal as man and artist, very precise in planning, producing ('My hand still steady' was one of the blessings he mentioned at the end of his career) and printing.
You wrote: 'It can apparently happen that someone, without much exact learning and will little of the information collected by earlier generations in his head, that such an individual, passing his days like other artists in the creation of more or less fantastical pictures, can one day feel ripen within himself a conscious wish to use his imaginary images to approach infinity as purely and as closely as possible.
'Deep, deep infinity! Quietness. To dream away from the tensions of daily living: to sail over a calm sea at the prow of a ship, toward a horizon that always recedes; to stare at the passing waves and listen to their monotonous soft murmur; to dream away into unconsciousness.
'Anyone who plunges into infinity...needs fixed points, mileposts...' and each of your carefully wrought images speak to both imperatives.
Yet the intellectual brilliance of your last work didn't rock me like some of your earlier, and how, using fine or broad parallel lines or cross-hatching, you created textures or borders. The white streaked hair of Eve over the black shoulder of Adam in your Sixth Day of Creation: I looked and looked to see how you did it. Maybe it's woodcut 101, but visually a challenge to me. And the billows in your Second Day: I feel them viscerally even in memory. And the tender picture of your young wife: how did you vary the thicknesses of your lines to suggest skin and not polished marble? The closer I looked, the more lost I became in your technique, in your careful hand wielding one of woodcutter's tools--lozenge graver, spitsticker, scorper, chisel--moving repetitively but with modulation over the surface of a piece of wood. Then the making of the print so that here it's black, black, black and beyond that exact line, white as white.
You, Mr Escher, quiet and overt as you were, challenged my hand, my eye, my imagination. I came away exhausted and delighted. Thank you.
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