M.C.Escher

In the end I'll share with you two more surprises (that's what happens when you dont do swaps or officials), with these two fantastic Escher cards sent by Alvin. I still need to get to that Escher Museum in the Hague though....

The first card shows Escher's woodcut in red, black and grey, called "Horseman" from 1946. This seems to be built on a translation but that is only applicable to the white horses or the brown horses if taken alone, and not to both. Upon closer inspection, the brown horses are actually a mirror reflection of the white horses, and this takes place along a vertical axis. This combines to form a glide reflection
The parade of red and grey horsemen – with the grey horsemen moving to the left and the red horsemen travelling to the right – form a tessellation in the centre of the piece. The grey horseman is depicted against a red background and the red horseman is depicted against a grey background. Or, as Escher puts it in his Phoenix article: “as if it were a woven fabric: the “pattern” in the foreground has the same colour as the “background” on the reverse side, and vice versa. The two form a closed circle.

The second one is a woodcut print called "Other World" (or also, "Another World"), dating back from 1947. It depicts a cubic architectural structure made from brick. The structure is a paradox with an open archway on each of the five visible sides of the cube. The structure wraps around the vertical axis to enclose the viewer's perspective. At the bottom of the image is an archway which we seem to be looking up from the base, and through it we can see space. At the top of that arch is another arch which is level with our perspective, and through it we are looking out over a lunar horizon. At the top of that arch is another arch which covers the top of the image. We are looking down at this arch from above and through it onto the lunar surface. Standing in each archway along the vertical axis is a metal sculpture of a bird with a humanoid face. In each side archway is a horn or cornucopia hanging on chains. It is interesting to note that the views from above and below are consistent, placing the statue so that it faces the horn, however the horizontal view reverses the relative positions of the statue and the horn, and rotates the horn 180 degrees.

My brain is not really wired to understand Escher, but that doesn't prevent me from admiring his work!

And here I would like to mention that thanks to one of the experts I was working with during this project, Ron, a lovely Dutch man (and I'm really gonna miss both him and his wife), I have my Escher calendar for 2016! Yes!! You can't even imagine the thrill I felt when he gave it to me!!

You can see that the Horseman is also featured here for November 2016! =)


Thanks a lot lot lot to Alvin for all the surprises this year, and he never ceases to add something to my Escher collection! And thanks so much to Ron and Agnes for the calendar and for all the great moments in the past two years! I'll really miss you guys!

And to all of you, thanks for dropping by! Until next time...stay warm! Hugs to all!!