MC Escher and His Trippy Art

same thing we made does in the final edit. I don't know what it is about to explain to everyone. Room tone is you do this on film sets and in studios where you just make everyone sit completely silently while you capture the sound of the room. So I guess you can. What do you do with that? Jerry layer it in in case you needed or something. Did you hear that? Everyone? She said, she cleans up the background to everybody listening, it sounded like there's something about it, though.

It's like being in church and getting the giggles, like it's really hard, especially on the film, so when there's like fifty people standing around being completely silent and farting, I suspect it's strictly a power trip. You think the person calling for a room tone, that's what I think. I'm gonna start doing that my house when things get out of hand. Room tone. Don't make me bust out the room tone on you. Well, since we're no, I

was gonna stay. Since we're talking about room tone, obviously, the topic today is mc escher, who was well known for going berserk anytime someone asked him to be quiet for room tone. You had trash chairs, grab reptiles straight out of the two dimensions and throw them into the third dimension to steal all sorts of weird stuff. That's funny. Did you think so that was a joke just for you? Yeah,

so he everyone knows mc esure. If you've ever been to college or taking drugs or sold drugs to somebody in college, then you've probably seen hands drawing hands or uh, I mean, that's not what the name of that one was,

but it's called drawing hands, is it? Or the Some of his more famous ones are the these impossible rooms, like stairs that lead to sideway stairs but you've gotta wrap your head around it in a certain way to even make sense of it, all right, or stairs that lead into other stairs that lead back into the other stairs. It is constant or I'm a big fan of that one self portrait he did in the the Sphere. Yeah there, the mirror Sphere. Mirror Sphere. Yeah, it's cool, it is

very cool. I'm not crazy about the face, even though I'm sure he did it exactly precise, but the hand, if you look at the hand, it's really realistic. It's very pretty. Yeah, I mean, I'd like this stuff. This is not my style, as in anything I would put on my walls these days, but I still think he's one of the like coolest, more innovative artists out there. And there's a great factoid that I hope will hold till the end, which are not the end, but kind of where it falls in our So what is what

is factory mean against? I mean, you've killed ten percent of all the facts and this is just one of the percent remaining. That's right, Okay, gotcha. So um. One of the things you chalk about m c es sure that I found was that if you were impressed by his work, prepared to get exponentially more impressive. We talked about how he made those works too. That's the fact of the show. For me. Okay, that's the fact. Got hold onto that. Sure, Sure, I was just teasing it

a little bit. I didn't know that's what you're talking about, although I should have guessed. So this is us talking about an artist, which means that we should probably talk about the artist being born. Um. And in the case of mc Escher, whose name, by the way, was more it's uh Cornelis. I want to say Cornelius, but there's no you in there. Sure I nailed the last name, but I'm spoke on name. Oh you didn't say nailed

the last name. This is the point where the people say, get to the point already, Well we are at that point. That's m C. And then Escher born June not nineteen nine. As as the Grabster put it was like mans he was born in leeu Warden, Netherlands, grew up in arn Him, which is about sixty miles southeast of A. Yeah, I mapped all this stuff out kind of that general area. You went on a little Google tour. Uh. And he

signed even from early on as m CE. He signed his paintings, although people called him mock m a UK friends and family right, which didn't mean anything, ed points out, but it's just like, you know, an affectionate term for Morrit's. Yeah, is it Maurits probably Marites, Marit's cornellis Escher. But he could also go the way of Morris. So is it Morrit's more? I don't know. I wish, I wish I knew. Well, what we do know is that, uh, in this we should put a pin in because it's sort of plays

a big part in how he pursued his art. But his dad had some money. He was a rich kid. Yeah, for sure, which really helps, as we'll see as he's trapesing around Europe on dad's time, slowly getting better at art slowly. Yeah, that's a good point because he was not great in school. He did love drawing class, but apparently wasn't you know, he didn't have his second grade

teachers falling over themselves about what a talented artist he was. No, and apparently he also didn't consider himself much of an artist, although he engaged in art like he he did produce art from a very young age. He was terrible in

school except that math and a drawing. Apparently, when he was in grade school primary school he failed his finals, all of them except for math and I read that his father noted in his journal with some affection that his son consoled himself by producing a Lena type of a sunflower. That's how he made himself feel better after after failing out of school. Well, and he he was somewhat adept at math early on, but um, it's interesting his his work is highly mathematical as far as art goes.

But later on in life, when he was confronted with real mathematicians, he would sort of be like, no, not me a man, Like I'm an artist. Well, I'm not that kind of mathematician, so I said yes, But he was most of his friends or mathematicians. For most of his career, he was mostly appreciated by mathematicians and scientists. Those are the people who really vibed on his work. And that came later. Okay, that Camel remaining out real popular. Um, but I saw that somebody made a movie called any

Into Infinity. It's a documentary, a full length documentary, I believe the whole things on YouTube. Um, and it starts out. The trailer starts out with Graham Nash saying, Hey, I called up mc escher one day just to say, Mr Esher, I think you're a really great artist, That's all I wanted you to say. And he said, I don't consider myself an artist. I consider myself a mathematician. Oh really, yes, So I'm going with Graham Nash's interpretation. Spoke to him directly. Yeah, yeah,

I mean it's crazy. He I mean, not to spoil anything, but he died, uh in just seventy three, So you know, if he would have lived to his like mid eighties, which is somewhat reasonable, Um, he he would have been like alive in the eighties, which just seems so weird. It does seem kind of weird, you know. Yeah, because he was he seems counter cultural for sure, even though his his personality was not very counter cultural. Um, and

he didn't really have much love for hippies. In fact, he later said that the hippies in San Francisco are legally making copies of my work. Um. He didn't exactly follow, you know, the normal usual beat throughout his lifetime. And he was he was. He was a mathematician. He was a bit of a square, but he was also a very imaginative square. That's right. I was trying to make

a square joke, but it's not coming to me. Remember that show Square Peg Square Peg Square Square pegs Sarah Jessica Parker was she and that she was also and girls just want to have fun, that's right. Yeah, And I'm going to see her on Broadway next spring really yeah. She and her husband are co starring in uh Plaza Sweet and Neil Simon's Plaza Sweet. Very nice, very excited

about that. But I'm trying to align it with a Bonnie Prince billy show, but that they're like a week apart, and I'm like, I can't just stay in there a lot of time to kill, especially when there's hourly flights between Atlanta New York. I know, I may just go see Bonnie princeci Billion come home because he didn't play much.

But that's a story for another day, all right. So he goes to school at Technical College of delf Um, not for very long, and then he went to the Harlem with two A's School of Architecture and Decorative Arts, which is west of Amsterdam, not Harlem, New York. Well, I think that's what the Harlem, New York is named after, right, Yeah, that's where Bonnie Prince. He's at town Hall. Actually, how is that right? Yeah? We played there, it's right, I

gotta stank on that joint. So his dad said, you know, because you know, his dad had a lot of money and made money. And even though you want to support your kids, you want the you want to try and edge them into something. If you're that kind of dude, that that might be lucrative. So he said, hey, you like to draw shapes, why don't you go study architecture. And he did that for a little while, even though

he wasn't super into it. But while at school there he had a very fortunate meeting by being mentored by one Samuel just Serin Demisquita, who would be his mentor, who noticed some of his early art. I'm not sure how he saw it, but he took one look at Esher's art and said, you don't need to go into architecture. Come study under me and learn graphic design. And so Escher did. He became a graphic designer, which he whether he knew it or not, he had been his whole

life up to that point. All of his work is very graphic in nature and design. Yeah, it really really is. But I'm sure his dad in the early, you know, nineteen twenties was probably like is that even a thing, right? That sounds made up? But well, his dad also, I don't know if you said or not, was a civil engineer, so of course he would be like, you draw, just go to architecture. That's what I know, civil engineering, and there's architects in the world. Just go do the other

thing that I don't do. And he probably thought graphic design just meant like you're gonna make signs, right or post his stamps or Christmas paper, which he did later on. That's right, So he made a little bit of dough. So in the early nineteen twenties he started on his uh sort of a rich kid journey, traveling around Europe on his dad's time on a gap year that was really really long, very long. But on one of these trips he went to a couple of places that would

end up having a big influence on him. One in Spain at the Alhambra, uh, and then just traveling through southern Italy through the countryside. Yeah, he just fell in love with Italy. Yeah, but in Spain this is this

is one that didn't bear fruit right away. But he was really fascinated by these mosaics and tesselations which are described as okay, they are repeating designs that interlock with one another, leave no space between one another, and that when you fit them together they fully cover a plane,

which is harder to do than you would think. Yeah, Like, if you've ever seen the ess er fish um sort of tessellation, the white fish and the black fish kind of working in one another, Yeah, that's a perfect example. And he would do this a lot later on. If you've ever played Cuberta, that's those cubes or tessellations a certain kind. But he got really into this, even though it wasn't like right away that he started doing these things.

That sort of came a little bit later. But what he did do was started drawing the Italian countryside because he loved it. Loved it. I mean like he he went to Italy, it was like this is my home, and he was Quota at one point in time is saying like he never wanted to become an Italian among Italians. He liked being a stranger um, but he loved Italy, which is an interesting thing to say. I'm not exactly

sure what it means. I think what he was saying was he's he he likes being a visitor to Italy rather than there's a certain amount of responsibility that comes with being one of us, you know what I mean. Whereas if you can be like that guy over there, who will accept him, We're not going to throw rocks him every time we see him or anything like that, and we'll take his money and you know, maybe even say hi to him or whatever. We'll leave him alone.

We won't include him in our expectations of what it means to be a local. Got you, That's what I think he was after Clearly I can identify with that. Well, that kind of came through in his work too, because if you'll notice, even in these um before he started doing the like trippy three dimensional hands drawing hands and stuff, when he was doing countrysides, he didn't do a lot of people, didn't do a lot of faces. People were

very much in the background and nondescript. But even when you look at these, when you say Italian still lives of countrysides, what came to mind for me were these beautiful, lush, colorful recreations of a countryside. Nope, when you look at these, they still look very much like in the m. C. E. S Ra style that we all know. Yeah, like very clearly. A lot of them too. They're cool. Yeah, they're beautiful.

They're black and white and then shades of ray, which is all just shading, right, Um, But they are beautiful in their way and lovely even. I like this stuff more than the trippy stuff. Oh yeah, yeah, I mean this is something I would put on my wall. You're an art snob, You're like, oh, I only like ER's early Italian landscapes. Oh man, take that trip stuff for Graham Nash. I'm so ashamed. No, I think it's great, Chuck you you have, but they are gorgeous. Um. And

then he met his wife. His name was Jetta. Jetta, that's right, very nice, thank you. She was swift, learned from the best. They met her in Italy, but she was Swiss, and she went home and they sent a bunch of love letters. It's a very sweet story. I'm sure mccer movie would be pretty cool. Somebody wrote a script or they wrote a dissertation about the process of writing a script about m c escher. It's from University of Texas, I wrote in two thousand and seventeen. I

can't remember the name of it, but just look up. Oh, just some random stuff comes up if you look up mosquito bootprint, which will come up later, but if you search that on Google, it brings up. Have you ever done that? Have you ever been like, I'm bored? I want to see what weird stuff I can unlock from Google? And it takes a certain amount of skill because Google wants to give you exactly what you're looking for. It doesn't want to give you just randomness, so you have

to trick it. So maybe you'll you'll type in a weird word or the first three letters of a word or something like that, and it's weird stuff will start to come. Well, if you type in mosquito bootprint, probably only like the first three of them pertain to m C s or and the rest are just a random

assortment of of links. I remember, early in the days of Google, Uh, we had a mutual friend who they did this what I thought was a very dumb game where they would try and find two words together that they would try and produce the fewest amount of Google results. And whoever could put two words together that found the fewest one. Yeah, And I don't know if you remember them doing that, but I don't know. I don't remember you talking about lots of waste of time. But I

remember that some guy did, like a Ted talk about that. Really. Yeah, well maybe I'm the dummy. No, no, no it was. I mean look at me. I like mcsher's early work. I think that's awesome. I mean, what taste. So he meets and gets married. Uh, she returns to Italy and

they married. Do you mean Jed That's right. She would become Jedda Esher and they had a son named Georgio later had sons Arthur and Yan, and Uh, they were still just sort of traveling and his dad was even though he was married, his dad was still footing the bill. Esher's dad mc escher's father. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, which I was thinking about it. I was like, gosh, you know, not get a benefactor. Wake up every day and look

at yourself in the mirror. But if you're if youre in the mirror sphere, right, how do you and then how do you draw it? So amazingly? Um? The father Estra's father though, and like, what better way to spend your money than to just be like, this is what you want to do with your life, son? You want to pursue art and live in beautiful Italy than like here, this is what I want for you, and that's like that's the pinnacle of what a parent can do for

their child in a lot of ways. No, totally, you know, it's not like, hey, why don't you go, you know, take up Heroin and here's a bunch of money for you to like lay around in a bitha. True I want to know more. I'm not I hope I'm not coming across the cynical, but I wonder if some of this was like he'll come around if I you know, to architecture or whatever. You kept waiting for the part where his father cuts him off. I was his father apparently wouldn't like that. All right. I know, I'm not

trying to talk you into my way of thinking. I'm not saying like I had. I started out thinking the same way you did. And then something happened. I was like, it was actually really neat of his day. It was it all seems above board. Yeah. So World War Two has a profound effect on Esher and his work. He learned that they were making his nine year old son, Georgio, marching fascist youth parades, and he said, pack your bags, were going to Switzerland. That is the appropriate response to

that news. Yeah, we're getting out of here, marching for moose Lein. Have you seen Jojo Rabbit yet? No? Is it good? Is it as good as it looks? It's great. I can't everything about it. Do I need to see in theater. It doesn't seem like one I have to see any I mean, you know, it's always fun to laugh with a big group of people, although by now it's probably thinned out. Uh. And I was laughing a lot and people weren't laughing. I like that kind of one of those deals. I mean, it's a movie about

a kid having Hitler as an imaginary friend. So don't tell me that I didn't know. I know, I had no idea that was on the poster. I know, but I didn't know he was an imaginary friend. Oh, get out of my brain. Sorry, that really doesn't spoil anything. Okay, don't tell me anything some big reveal. Um. So they go to Switzerland. All apologies as long as it's not

a big spoiler. No, no, no no, no, of course not. Um. They go to Switzerland and he even though he did not like the mountains, he didn't like the snow, did not like cold, weather. So they moved to Belgium after a couple of years, which is just beautiful compared to Switzerland. Belgium is nice. Uh. In the nineteen in May of nineteen forty though, the Nazis invaded Belgium, and so they moved to the Netherlands in ninety one, where the Nazis already were. Yeah, I guess they can't occupy it again.

Well in its home. Uh, And they've settled in Barn, which is about twenty three miles southeast of Amsterdam. I don't know if that's how you're supposed to say it be a A A R. I like it's probably Barren. Oh, yeah, I'll bet you just nailed it. I think so. But duchess very strange. But it's not strange, but just for my English, dumb English years, supposedly English is the strangest of all. Yeah, I'm sure it's just a hybrid mongrel language that doesn't make any sense to anyone who's not

a native speaker of it. You know, what is an interesting language is Welsh. Because I'm watching the Crown and uh, when Prince Charles starts coming around Prince of Wales, there's people speaking Welsh and I was very ignorant about even knowing that what it sounds like, what it sounds like, and that it was still spoken, and uh, it was a very odd hybrid. It sounded like several different things. It's all old Celtic stuff. Yeah, very unusual gallic Gallic, Yeah,

I think it's Gallic. That's Galic language group, one of the two. Yeah. Everything I know about Welsh I learned from super furry animals. Oh yeah, because that guy's Welsh Man. I saw them blood Granddaddy off the stage one time. Oh you saw him live? Oh I think he told me. That melted my brain. So they're traveling around still, even though they're settled in Barn, and they go back to al Hambra in Spain, which I don't think we said what that is. No, it's a it's a thirteenth century

Moorish castle from when the Moors conquered Spain's beautiful. It is very beautiful, and they built it in the Moorish style and then it was eventually like taken over by the Christian like royalty that that explored the New World and all that stuff. But this castle was done in these tiles that are renowned for being some of the most beautiful geometric like Islamic patterns you've ever seen in your life. And they got to Escher. He'd seen him before, but it was I guess he was like, oh, that's

kind of cool. But the second trip that he went back with after they moved to from Switzerland, I think to Belgium or maybe to Switzerland. UM, that's when he was like, I am obsessed with these now, please tessellations started drawing him. Jetted it too, says that they worked together, so I'm not I didn't know that she was an artist. I didn't either, but they World War two comes back around? Will that comes back around? And never left, let's be honest.

But UH Spain would devolve into civil war, and so this meant that he was kind of stuck in uh outside of Amsterdam for a little while. Longer, he wasn't doing as much traveling. No, he was in the Netherlands and um he rekindled his friendship with Mosquito, his old mentor who had stayed in Netherlands this whole time, and Mosquito was Jewish and he was taken away by the Nazis. Eventually he was killed at um Auschwitz. I believe with his wife and their son was also killed in another

concentration camp by the Nazis. And this really got to Escher, like, this is one of his dear friends, and he had um a work, a sketch of mosquitoes. When he went to his house to visit Mosquito, he found the door was opened and they weren't there, and they'd clearly been taken by the Nazis. And one of the pieces of artwork that he gathered together to preserve was a sketch of mosquitoes that had a Nazi bootprint on it. And that's what you were referenced earlier with your Google search

Mosquito bootprint. Was there a picture of it? No, I couldn't find anything aside from the fact that it was a sketch, not that it was a sketch of what or anything like that, just that there was a sketch of mosquitoes that was that had a boot a bore bootprint, and that Escher hung onto This is his entire life. It was very important to him, and he was not um uh a very flowery like um like passionate man or anything like that. I get the impression that he

and this is sure, I'm talking about that. He internalized a lot of stuff. Uh, and I think that him holding onto that piece of art was probably a more significant than even it appears on the outside. Yeah. And uh supposedly Um hid some people from a Jewish family during the Nazi occupation years, and also during those same years did not exhibit or release any prints. Wait a minute, I think you just said hid some people from a Jewish family or did you say hid some members of

a Jewish family. Well, people members of a Jewish family, but you said from I think yeah, I mean like they were from a Jewish family and got you. He didn't hide them from right, right, don't tell the Jewish family that you're hiding over here. No, that would have been weird. Uh. So maybe we should take a break now. Oh, I think it's unraveled at the point the guys are right. Yeah, okay, Chuck. So World War Two kind of comes and goes around Escher despite his best efforts to escape it. Um And

it definitely had a mark on him. But one of the other things that that had a really big mark on him was having to move from Italy. It was like you said, like he was married, had a family, his father was still supporting him, and every spring and summer he would just tour the Italian countryside and visit small quaint towns and just be inspired to keep making these Italian landscapes. But it makes a really great point here that his Italian landscapes are very handsome works of art,

very beautiful, favorite, technically proficient. There Chuck's favorite. But you would almost certainly have never seen them in your entire life were it not for him moving from Italy, because in doing so, he lost his source of inspiration ration and it was forced to kind of turn inward because he hated what Switzerland looked like. He wasn't apparently very

inspired by his home country of the Netherlands. Um so he had to kind of turn inward into his own imagination and start coming up with new subjects, and in doing that, the true essuer was was unlocked. Yeah, because early in like a lot of artists early in their career, they they kind of free ranged through different styles, trying to find their own personal thing. He had a very

very colorful clown period. It's very bizarre, doesn't fit with the rest of it, very John Wayne Gacy, right, but you can very clearly see if you look at Mosquito's work, that connection and the influence from him. Um, although Mosquito did a lot of sort of graphic portraits and things like that, whereas Escher didn't really worry too much about humans and faces. Yeah yeah, um they were they were

just kind of like almost afterthoughts. But early on he did start experimenting stuff that would later become sort of his hallmark. When he did do like a uh sketch of a building, let's say, it would be from this really like tall odd angle looking down on it, very severe angles and like a horizon, or trees that sort of go on into infinity. Stuff like that that would

become very much his style later on. And Ed very astutely points out that there's something about his style that, um, I don't know how dark of a person he was emotionally, but there is something about the severity of these angles and a lot of his work that was just sort of um uneasy feeling. It didn't look like just some beautiful, colorful Italian countryside. There was something kind of strange and unusual about it. Something about the contrast of black and

white definitely does it too. And he was such a master of shading that if something was stark and black and white, I mean, unless it was his earliest work was because he wanted it to look that way and to make it stark and kind of un settling like that. But yeah, there's like a certain amount of dread in a lot of his stuff. Yeah, and it's not something you can easily put your finger on, but it's definitely there. Yeah,

Like did you see uh the mummified priests. Yeah, that was creepy and then one of the isn't it more creepy to actually do that in real life? Stand them up like that in these little alcoves? Oh yeah, absolutely, just don't kill the messenger. And he would have sometimes skulls um featured in some of his work and stuff like that, like the one of the Eye believe called I right in the middle of the people as a

skull staring back. So he had little touches like that without going full like uh, you know, love craft Ian

right or Goya or something like that. I don't even bosh, I don't know who that is, Sure you do, I'm just kidding, Okay, I know those people, so uh, his I guess this is where we get to the fact of the show for me, take it away, Chuck, because folks, if you've ever seen an M. C. Ser print and he thought, man, that guy could sure draw a print, imagine cutting that out of wood in reverse, in reverse, because that's what he did. A lot of his stuff

were wood cuts. Even harder than that, Chuck, is the lithograph. Yeah, so a wood cut. If you've ever made used a stamp, or made a potato stamp, basically, well, that's what it is. He's actually carving the stuff into wood as a negative image because then when you run ink over it and stamp it, you get the positive image. And it's just incredible. I mean, it's hard enough to draw and sketch this stuff, much less cut it out of wood. Right, So so just take a step back and think about the ashers

that you've seen before. Imagine that they were they were originally carved out of would and now imagine that to get even more detailing, because you can't adjust how much ink is certain part of the wood block gets. It's all going to get an even layer of ink. So to shade something you have to do cross hatching lines, stipling something like that. But to get really detailed with shading.

You need multiple blocks of the same image in the exact same size, with different parts accentuated, so that you can layer over. You can take the same paper and layer them on different blocks and line them up so that you have layers to this image. That was the level of the wood cuts this guy was doing. Yeah, Like, that's sort of like a T shirt screen printing, like

a four color shirt. You gotta layer, you gotta put it on exactly in the in the spot that it needs to go each time, drag that ink across, so it's not you know, off by a centimeter because it would look bad. So the wood cuts, um, especially as earlier woodcuts. You can tell their wood cuts they look like wood cuts. Some of them do not. There's some of the Italian countryside. Um that's just are just yeah,

are just astounding. And when you stop and think about the idea that they it's not a drawing, that their wood cuts, multiple blocked wood cuts, is pretty astounding. But like I was saying to me, even even more difficult is making the lithograph. Yeah. I think I talked about this on some other episode. Um, I know it talked about batiguing, but I also talked to in industrial arts. We did offset lithography in that social experiment high school exactly.

We did offset lithography, which um basically I mean that's the process today. I mean that's how they make newspapers, posters, books, maps, kind of everything. This is with offset lithography. It was in do you remember it was in the um Et Sketch episode. That's what I art originally did, was lithography. Okay, well this is this is pre like today, you use like aluminum or some other kind of metal sheet and

these emulsions and chemicals. Back then it was drawn into limestone, a flat slab of limestone with a grease pencil, and then use a chemical treatment uh to uh on the areas that basically water and inc don't mix. It's sort of all built on that principle. So the areas where you have written in Greece do not hold that inc or is it the other way around? No, I think

they don't hold the Yeah. Again, what you're doing is creating a negative image, just like the wood cut essentially, so you've got this um attraction and repulsion interplay between ink, water and grease, and when you put it all together on limestone, it makes these extremely subtle gradients of shading that are kind of like a hallmark of some of Escher's more um well known works. Yeah, the hands drawing hands, right, Yeah,

that was a lithograph. He made that with limestone and grease, pen and ink, and um did it in reverse too, because just like with the woodblock, you have to create the negative of it because you want the positive image on the paper. You have a very special brain if this is if you can work this stuff out as

an artist. You know, it's uh, not saying that any kind of artist is any better or worse or smarter than the next, but your brain just has to be wired a little bit differently to thinking negatives like that, like a mathematician. Basically, yeah, your brain has to be set up that way. Yeah, absolutely, But lithography is difficult, very labor intensive. So later on he would hire a lithographer to actually create his prints after he's sketched and

drawn the stuff out smart and he would destroy the limestone. Well, he wouldn't destroy it, he would scrape it clean so we could reuse it. So that's the reason. Like if you want to buy an original mc Escher, good luck. Well, there's there's no such thing. There's original prints that he made and apparently you're not gonna get your hands one of those limestones. No, but there are a couple of those left over. But he said that he wanted him. I think canceled is what they call it in his will,

where they intentionally damage it. So that even if you got ahold of one of these things and you were like, I'm gonna print me a brand new esure Um, there'd be like the like the the negative image of sniggle Puss like comes through and like the hand drawing hands picture h And he did not do many original prints from those original woodcuts and lithographs either. I think he only did ten of still life with spherical mirror. And so anything obviously, anything you'd buy in a Spencer Gifts,

it's going to be a print anyway. What they told me it was, you mean bikini Lady on corvette. You can probably get the original of that. It Spencer probably cut the original negative um Bikini Lady Corvette man, remember that filled with Lamborghini. The these lithographs, he would also layer those just like you did with the woodcuts, creating multiple plates to layer on top of one another for shading and toning and stuff like that. It's just amazing. I mean I did it to make a monkey's T shirt.

I forgot. You used to screen print too, so did I? Yeah? Well, actually the monkeys T shirt was screen printing. I think I can't remember what what I did for a lithograph. I think something to make a notepad that said like my name and something else. Oh that's right. So you you screen printed in industrial arts? Yes? Okay, like you were you ever employed gainfully as a screen No? Oh did you do that? Yeah? No? I mean I would have loved to it. I wasn't good enough. It's always

not hard. Yeah, but I mean you would draw the stuff for you? No? No, no, no, would like burn the screens and everything and drag the ink through. And he did for for a job, well like high school? No, this is it college? What kind of dough do you make doing that? Jack? Yeah? But it's fun. It's cool work. You know, you just listen to beer and a few bucks pretty much hang out with some cool dudes and you know that's yeah. Yeah, I got you good early college job, you know what I mean? I think it'd

be cool. And I mean there's a very cool T shirt local T shirt shop here that every time I go over there, because that's where our friend, uh, the patchmaker, uh Katie Culp works, or at least she used to. I think she's got her own space now, but she shared a space with T shirt dudes, and anytime I'm in there, it's just a good vibe, you know what I mean. There are a lot worse places to spend your time than a T shirt shop, So uh oh.

Another thing we should point out is that he did do color occasionally, but color was a whole different You had to do a separate stone for each color. So that's why a lot of his stuff ended up in black and white, aside from the fact that he liked it as well. Yeah, he seemed to be very pleased with black and white in general. Yeah, I'm not saying

he was lazy. No, but let's take a step back here for a second and examine the idea that you thought M. C. Escher was a pretty amazing artist when you just imagined that he was sitting in his studio drawing all of this stuff with a pencil. Now, really let it sink in that he carved these things in reverse out of wood or limestone or limestone and then use these crazy techniques to make these extraordinarily detailed, incredibly

precise and technical works of art. It's amazing. It really is amazing, truly astounding, And like you said, there are a few of those stones and woodblocks that are owned by the mc Escher Foundation puts on every single one of them, and apparently they will they will display them occasionally along with his works, right, which I imagine seeing that and then looking at the work of art, and then going back looking at that limestone and then looking

at the work of art. It really kind of sinks in, like, oh my, yeah, I'd love to see an exhibition of his stuff me too. They've picked up in recent years. Yeah, it seems like he's being more appreciated, uh as a

truly great artist and less college dorm wall material. In two thousand and eleven, the record for highest overall attendance in the world out of all the museums in the world that year, was at the Centro Cultural bank oh To, Brazil, which held their Magical World of Escher exhibit seventy thousand visitors, about ten thousand a day. Yep. So, if you think lithography and woodcutting sounds difficult. We'll talk a minute about

meso tent Uh. That is sort of like wood cutting, except you're using a sheet of copper that starts out as a rough surface and then use these little tools to smooth out things that are going to be the image, applying that ink and then wiping it off. Right, So the places you smooth out are don't have ink, the ones that are gonna be white on the paper, blank on the paper, right. Um, it's the rough edges that hold the ink. So you cover the whole thing with ink,

wipe it down. The smooth starts parts, parts come clean. The rough stuff um has the ink, and you can use this like this is this isn't like oh look I made an next this is like incredibly fine um stipling is possible with these copper plates and all. This a meso tint. And that I that you were talking about going with the skull, if you go back and

look at that, that was a meso tint. Yeah, it was dew drop, very detailed cupped leaf showing a single drop of dew inside it, with all kinds of cool reflections. But Estra called this the black art. Uh. He only made eight of these because it is a real undertaking, and I think he is. He did a handful of him and then moved on to the far easier woodcutting.

Right right, He's like, I came back, baby, all right, Well we'll take a break and then we'll come back and pick up with his life story again, which is I believably left off in what end of World War two? Sounds right? All right? Okay, world War two is over? Uh mc yesher was, like a lot of people, very rattled by that experience in Europe. And at this point he's still is not a super famous artist making tons of money. No, but he's more famous than than this

makes him out to be. Like he he's he's got some renown in the Netherlands or certain circle tibbits. Yeah, um, but he's not anywhere anywhere even approaching how he is today or how he has been the last few decades, since about like the late sixties. Yeah, college dorms have not yet started putting his stuff everywhere. No, but the people who who most appreciate what he's doing our scientists

and mathematicians who are like this is astounding. This guy is taking what we write out as formulas and turning them into art. And making them precise, like you could describe this work of art as a formula. That's that is what mc escher was able to do. He was able to take math and translated into a visual art. Yeah. And uh, you know, remember what you said earlier. This is where we are in his life. Where he is, Um, he is not in the Italian countryside. He's been ripped

from its bodice. So his muse has gone and he is now looking inward for his inspiration in his own, um unique brain. He's being forced into his own bodice. Face first, Uh, this is where he starts with these tessellations, more elaborate geometric shapes. He's doing the lizards and the birds and the insects. Is tessellations really really cool stuff? Um? His brother said, hey, dude, you know what you should do is go talk to a crystallographer. He's like, if

you want to talk detailed shapes and math. Uh, And he does so and that taught him a lot. And then he learned about the seventeen seventeen wallpaper groups, which is so dense that you know, how much do we even want to talk about it? Well, the we'll just sum it up. The seventeen wallpaper groups basically is a mathematical concept that says every geometric pattern two dimensional geometric

pattern falls into one of seventeen categories. There's only seventeen, and they're called, kind of half jokingly, the wallpaper groups, because wallpaper has geometric patterns are usually right. Um, as your couldn't understand it mathematically. Yeah, it was proved out twice independently that there are seven teen wallpapers, and the mathematical proof. One of the things that's interesting, Chuck, is the Alhambra apparently is the only place in the world

that contains all seventeen geometric wallpaper patterns. That's pretty cool. Yeah, so of course this would appeal to Esher, but he

didn't understand. He couldn't sit down and explain, like, we can't what the seven team wallpaper groups are or what they mean mathematically, but he understood them intuitively, and as he became friends with mathematicians, uh you know, about mid career, um, he was apparently kind of amused to find like, you know, these guys spend all this time writing this stuff out in these formulas, and I just know it. It was almost like I was born knowing it. Yeah, I mean,

I guess he was real cocky. Yeah, he wasn't really And I didn't get the idea either that he was like take your math and shove it. He was just a little more amused that, like you've got these mathematical proofs that uh like, I'm drawing this stuff from my creative brain on limestone, limestone, cutting it out of wood. Uh. So I think he appreciated the way they coalesced. But uh and he was very like you said, most of his friends were mathematicians, I think later in life. Who

did he have roses? Yeah, Roger and Lionel Penrose, which I love how it was described here, father and son mathematician team. Yeah, you know those they were matching dolphins shorts, oh man, part of their uniform. I wish people still were those. You'd you ever were those? No, they were a little before my time. Well they were for joggers and runners. Yeah, and eleven and who do I forgot about that? Yeah? That is what Hooters waitress shorts with.

Remember bronze pantyhose yeah, and then chunky white socks. Yeah. And it was a very high top. Was bizarre and interesting. Look somebody put that together and not a. Um, do you remember there was a there was a Hooters airline? What? Yeah, wow, that kind of rings a bell. Yeah, that was very short lived, I imagine, I believe, so it was pretty short lived. Interesting, I guess. Yeah. So you would get asked like what kind of drink and what style of

chicken wings do you want? Everything did serve chicken wings on those, of course, But can you imagine being on an airplane being forced to smell chicken wings the whole time if you didn't like it. That's like every flight I ever take. It's true, there's somebody with some stinky food. You know. If I sit next to somebody on the plane and I'm going to eat, I asked them if it's okay if I eat, Like if you bring food on. I don't bring food onto a flight sometimes, dude, you

just have to. It's a long flight and run out of turkey wraps, like in the first half a second, so you just pull out your what my kung pao out of your pocket you had just in case they're out of turkey raps, not even in a container, just in my pocket. Oh goodness. So I thought this part

was sort of amusing. Um, how orderly he always was with his art, and he tried to get into chaos a bit in this one work contrast Parentheses Order and Chaos Parentheses, wherein he went in dug up a bunch of trash and said, I will I will draw chaos, and it ended up being if you go and look at it, there's like a broken bottle, broken eggshell and open sardine tin and broken clay pipe and some other refuse drawn to like perfect or I guess woodcutter lithographed

with perfect, beautiful precision. That was chaos his interpretation of it. He just couldn't do it. He was very much preoccupied with Kassi has a very famous quote, probably his most famous coat quote, we adore chaos because we love to produce order. And he's like, by we, I mean me, Yeah. Sure, sounded very much like an eye statement, but he was. He was very much into geometry and precision and clean lines and all that. Yeah. And also as his career

would progress, this this these repeating patterns on a finite space. Um. If you've seen his circle limit series, that's where you'll find the fish or these demons. And they start out with like one in the center and then there's a pattern all around, and it as it gets closer and close to the edge, they get smaller and smaller and smaller, and you can just sort of imagine that there is no end to these shapes, that they're just going infinitely

around this sphere perfectly. But again you have to stop and remind yourself this is a two dimensional image I'm looking at. And then secondly this is cut out of wood. But yeah, he apparently made a three dimensional wood carving of his circle limits series later in life. And I'll bet that's spectacular to see. Two he made it, what a three dimensional wood carving of it, basically proving that his his two dimensional drawing was accurate. Yeah, because he

made it in the three dimensions. That's awesome. Yeah, it's pretty. He was just showing off towards the end there. I like reptiles aside from his early countryside work, that is far superior. The tessellation of the lizards and reptiles is really neat. That's the one that has the lizards being like crawling off of the page as a drawn image, circling around, walking over some books, and then crawling back over onto the page as a drawn image. Yeah, very neat.

It's a it's a lot like the hands drawing or drawing hands one kind of where the hands are drawing themselves or one another, but they're also three dimensional two and that actually kind of jobs with another quote he had um that I think really sums that style of art up. He said, the flat shape irritates me. I feel as if I were shouting to my figures, you are too fictitious for me. You just lie there, static and frozen together. Do something. Come out of there and

show me what you are capable of. And he would shout it just like that, and then Jetta would back out of the room slowly, pekay, dear your t uh. And that sort of brings us to with the reptiles. Uh. We we need to talk a little bit about illusion, um, because it started sort of early on. He was preoccupied with illusion, whether it was like these lizards coming off the page or still life in Street, which is a tabletop that blends into a street scene. Yeah, it's really cool.

I like that one too, um. Or relativity, which I don't know, I mean, is there a most famous maybe hands it's between hands self portrait with sphere and relativity. Relativity is the one with the staircases and people going up and downstairs that don't go anywhere, but they go everywhere, and they circle back on each other, and it's just

an impossible staircase actually called Penrose stairs. Oh really yeah, after the famous father and son mathematician team, and speaking of the Penrose Is, they'd just say, mathemagician, I just invented something I did that's amazing, completely by accident, um the pen Roses. That would be great math magician. I bet that's something for But the Penroses apparently wrote they saw some of Esher's work, wrote a paper explaining his work about impossible things like impossible stairs, which came to

be called Penrose stairs. And uh, Escher was either mailed a copy of this or somebody pointed out to him, so he created something called house of stairs or upstairs downstairs, one of the two, and Um sent one of the original prints to the Penroses. So in a way their correspondence and inspiration for one another was like a set

of impossible stairs in real life. That interesting. And this is you know, we were talking earlier about how his works somehow felt unsettling, and you know the subject matter as well. When you think about these the subjects walking in relativity, clearly never getting anywhere, walking downstairs sideways. All of a sudden, I'm walking back into the same staircase I was just on. Like you imagine if these things were to come alive, they would be frustrated, angry people. Right.

And as a matter of fact, one of the um the one that you're just talking about upstairs, downstairs, they that was supposedly based on some a staircase in his school, which suddenly says quite a bit about his psychology. Don't you think, well, how so well? I mean, like these these students aren't going anywhere, they're not even human their centipedes with human faces, and they're kind of trapped in this what you could definitely call like a uh a

purposeless existence in this building. It's kind of a dark building. Interesting. So he does finally achieve really great fame later in his life. Like you said, he was holding exhibitions in the Netherlands and in a little bit in Europe, but he did one in Belgium in ninety that led to an article in The Studio, which was an art magazine, and that captured the attention of a journalist who wrote about him in Time and Life magazines, which definitely propped

him up a little bit. Uh. Then that led to a larger exhibition at the International Mathematical Congress in fifty four. Flash forward to sixty six, he was featured in Um Mathematical Games column in Scientific American by Martin Gardner Mathew magician. I guarantee that's the thing Um, And that increased his And this was sixty six, so it was kind of perfect timing with the hippies and the drugs and the counterculture.

And I guess who was it, Graham Nash, Graham Nash Mick Jagger sent him a fan ladder and made the mistake of calling him by his first name. Sasure did not appreciate Um. Stanley Kubrick tried to recruit him to make two thousand one of Space Autists see a fourth dimensional film. Huh. Yeah, there's this interesting article called the Impossible World of mc Escher that Stephen Poole wrote in The Guardian that has a lot of that stuff in it. But he was he was kind of like, no, I'm

good over here with the math mathematician friends. Well, once he was featured in Scientific American, that led to the big daddy of them all. He got featured in Rolling Stone and then after that it was it was all over. He was huge, dorm room, huge fight works. Uh, then this doesn't count all the sketches and drafts. These are like the actual final works. And like we said earlier, he died in two cancer the age of seventy three.

And I tried to find more about his family, but there's not a lot out there, like his sons and whether or not his I mean, I guess his grandkids would be contemporaries of ours. Yep, I don't know, like he was born in eight well, great grandkids maybe, yeah, Okay, I guess if his kids were born in the nineteen twenties, Yeah, contemporaries of our parents. Maybe the old stars Yeah boomers boomery boomer um. So we get that right. In that that Journey to Infinity movie, apparently all three of his

children appear in it. If you want to know more about them, go watch that. I saw one picture of him where he looked a lot like our old colleague John Fuller when John had a beard. Oh yeah he did, didn't it's a little bit like him. Yeah, it's not expecting that. So there's mc sure that. Speaking of not expecting that, uh, Bikini Babe on Corvette and Hooters Airline made appearances in the MCS. I just want to point out, if you want to know more about any of those things,

go on to the Internet and start searching. And since I said that, it's time for listener mail. Hey, guys have been listening to your show since two thousand eleven. They even see I've even seen you on your first amazing show in Chicago and had to wait a whole year to hear that on the podcast. That's how it works. It's not even guaranteed that it's going to be the show you saw. Yeah. A lot of podcasts put out just tons and tons of live shows. Uh, we don't

do that. Yeah, and I honestly think the live shows are a little better in person. I don't think they make as a fan of other podcasts, I don't think they make for the best just regular content. I think most people think that, but we we just so that's why we only put out the one. So back to the letter, this show is so great. I would even save high interest episodes for my son to listen to over the years. Uh, you were one of the few

people that can keep his attention. I never thought it would write, but as a science teacher, you said something recently that it's so true. Some of the best science websites are children's science websites. Or if a definition is too difficult, I always tell people to look up a child's definition for that word. Uh. Really good tip, guys. Thanks for sharing that. Thanks for all your work, and now I don't have to figure out what to do now that I am finally caught up. Keep up the

great work. And that is from Jenny with an Eye. Thanks Jenny with an eye. Hopefully you dot the eye with the heart, maybe with a little reflection on the side of the heart. Remember that one two curve lines top with topped and uh, I guess bottomed with a straight line. I think I know what you're talking about here. I'll show you, oh boy, since we just oh sure that yeah, yeah, it almost looks like a bent Roman numeral two inside the heart. That's a that's the reflection

of light. That's where the lights coming from. It's beautiful. Thanks treasure that you're welcome to I wasn't gonna give it to you, but now I have to just sign it first. If you want to get in touch with us, you can go onto stuff you Should Know dot com and look for our social links there, and you can also send us an email like Jenny with an I did you and send it to stuff podcast at iHeart radio dot com. Stuff you Should Know is a production

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