Hi, everybody. Chuck here on a Saturday. I'm just sitting here drawing cubes and things with my poor artwork. But you know who was really good at this? Mc Esher And this episode from December twenty nineteen gets all into the life of the great artist. And the title is mc esher and his Trippy Art. I hope you enjoy it. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Hey, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W Chuck Bryant, and there's Jerry over there, and this is Stuff you Should Know.
The Arts Sea.
Edition is Jerry Roomtone. Roland.
Yeah, I think that's make believe stuff.
Room tone.
Yeah.
She might as well be like, let me capture a few fairies in this, Mason jow First.
I think it's the same thing.
We may need us in the final edit. Perry, 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, Joe? Do you layer it in in case you need it 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 a film set when there's like fifty people standing around being completely silent.
I suspect it's strictly a power trip, you think, So the person calling for a room tone, that's what I think.
I'm going to start doing that my house when things get out of hand room tone?
Do you think that works?
Don't make me bust out the room tone on you? Well, since this no, no, I was going to say, since we're talking about room tone, obviously, the topic today is mc escher, who is well known for going berserk anytime someone asked him to be quiet for room tone, trash chairs, grab reptiles straight out of the two dimensions and throw them into the third dimension, just do 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 es or. If you've ever been to college or taken drugs.
Or sold drugs to somebody in college.
Then you've probably seen hands drawing hands or I mean, that's not what the name of that one.
Was, but it's called drawing hands, oh is it?
Or the Some of his more famous ones are the these impossible rooms like stairs that lead to sideway stairs but you got to 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.
Sure this is constant.
Or I'm a big fan of that one self portrait he did in the with the sphere. Yeah, 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 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 coolest, more innovative artists out there.
Yeah.
And there's a great factoid that I hope will hold till the end, which not the end but kind of where it falls in our So what an outline?
What does factoid mean against I mean you've killed ten percent of all the facts, that's right, and this is just one of the ten percent remaining.
That's right.
Okay, gotcha. So one of the things you chuck about MC.
I sure that I found was that if you were impressed by his work, prepared to get exponentially more impressed as we talk about how he made those works. Well too, that's the fact of the show too for me. Oh okay, that's the factoid you.
Yeah, you got a hold onto that.
Oh sure, sure, 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. Yeah. So this is a talking about an artist, which means that we should probably talk about the artist being born. And in the case of MC Escher, whose name, by the way, was Moritz Cornelis, I want to say Cornelius, but there's no U in there.
I think Cornelis.
Sure Esher, I nailed the last nurme. That's right, But I misspoke on name.
Oh you didn't say the name nrme.
So I nailed the last nurme.
This is the point where the people say, get to the point already.
Well we are at that point. That's MC and then Esher born June seventeenth, eighteen ninety eight, not nineteen eighty nine, as the Grabster put it. Yeah, it was like, man, he's like, here's the numbers. He was born in leu Warden, Netherlands, grew up in Arnheim, which is about sixty miles southeast of Amsterdam.
Is that right?
Yeah? Okay, I mapped all this stuff out nice, kind of that general area.
He went on a little Google tour.
Sure, and he signed even from early on as MCE 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 Moritz. Yeah, is it Mouritz?
Probably Maritz Maurites, cornelis Escher, but.
It could also go the way of Morris. So is it Moritz or more?
I don't know.
I wish I knew.
Well. What we do know is that in this we should put a pin in because it 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 dime, 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 did produce art from a very young age. He was terrible in school, except at math and at drawing. Apparently when he was in grade school primary school he failed as 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 lina type of
a sunflower. That's how he made himself feel better after failing out of school.
Well, and he was somewhat adept at math early on. But it's interesting 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, man, I'm an artist. Well, I'm not that kind of mathematician.
So I said yes. But he was most of his friends were 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 drugs that came later. That came later, and he got real popular. But I saw that somebody made a movie called Journey into Infinity documentary, full length documentary.
I believe the whole.
Thing's on YouTube, and it starts out.
The trailer starts out with.
Graham Nash saying, Hey, I called up mc esher one day just to say, mister 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 as counter to this spoke to him directly.
Yeah, yeah, I mean it's crazy. He I mean, not to spoil anything, but he died in nineteen seventy two at just seventy three. So you know, if he would have lived to his like mid eighties, which is somewhat reasonable, 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 countercultural for sure, even though him his personality was not very countercultural. No, 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. He didn't exactly follow, you know, the normal usual beat throughout his lifetime. And 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, yeah, square peg.
Sarah Jesica Parker was she in that. She was also in 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 Plaza Suite 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 they're like a week apart, and I'm like, I can't just stay in New York.
Time to kill, especially when there's hourly flights between Atlanta and New York.
I know, I may just go see Bonnie Prince Billy and 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 Delft, 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, Oh is that right? Yeah, we played there.
That's right. We got our stink 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 you want to try and edge them into something. Sure, if you're that kind of dude, 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 Jasurin Demisquita m.
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 designing.
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?
Yeah.
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 do architecture, right, 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, until he made a little bit of dough. So in the early nineteen twenties, he started on his sort of rich kid journey, traveling around Europe on his dad's dime.
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. Yeah, one in Spain at the Alhambra, 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 esher fish sort of tesselation.
The whitefish and the blackfish 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 Cubert, Yeah, those cubes are tesselations, sure, 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 went to Italy, he was like, this is my home.
Yeah.
And he was quoted at one point in time as saying like he never wanted to be an Italian among Italians. He liked being a stranger, 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 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 at 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, but we'll leave him alone.
We won't include him in our expectations of what it means to be a local. Gotcha, 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, before he started doing the like trippy three dimensional handstrawing 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, Nope, when you look at these, they still look very much like in the mc escher style that we all know.
Yeah, like very clearly. A lot of love them too.
They're cool.
Yeah, they're beautiful.
Yeah, they're black and white and then shades of gray, which is all just shading, right, Yeah, 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 Esher's early Italian landscapes.
Oh man, you take that, say the trippy stuff for Graham Nash.
I'm so ashamed.
No, I think it's great, Chuck. You you have.
Totally right but they are gorgeous. And then in nineteen twenty three he met his wife.
His name was Jetta jedda Umaker.
That's right, very nice, thank you.
She was learned from the.
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 an mcacsher movie would be pretty cool.
Somebody wrote a script or they wrote a dissertation about the process of writing a script about mc esher. It's from University of Texas. I wrote it in twenty 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 weird stuff will start to come. Well if you type in mosquito. Probably only like the first three of them pertained to m cescher and the rest are just a random assortment of links.
I remember, early in the days of Google, 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 so I don't know. I don't remember you talking about lost a waste of time.
But I remember that some guy did, like a ted talk about that.
Oh really yeah, Oh well, maybe I'm the dummy.
No, no, no, it was.
I mean, look at me. I'd like mcsher's early work.
I think that's awesome. I mean, what taste. Yeah, you know.
So he meets and gets married. She returns to Italy and they married nineteen twenty four.
Do you mean Jeda Umaker.
That's right. She would become Jeda Esher.
Jeda Umiker Esher, and.
They had a son named Georgio. Later had sons, Arthur and Jan 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 father, Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, which I was just thinking about it. I was like, gosh, you know, I get a benefactor. Wake up every day and look at yourself in the mirror.
But if you're if you're in the mirror sphere.
Right, how do you and then how do you draw it?
Yeah?
So amazingly the the father Esher'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 awesome.
That's the pinnacle of what a parent can do for their child in a lot of ways.
No, totally 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 BEFA.
True I want to know more. I'm not I hope I'm not coming across his cynical but I wonder if some of this was like, he'll come around if I you know, to architecture or whatever.
Right, 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 how you feel. 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, Oh, it was actually really neat of his dad.
It was it all seems above board. Yeah. So World War Two has a profound effect on Esher and his work. In nineteen thirty five, he learned that they were making his nine year old son, Georgio, marching fascist youth parades, and he said, pack your bags, we're going to Switzerland.
That is the appropriate response to that news. Yeah, we're getting out of here marching for Mussolini.
Have you seen Jojo Rabbit yet?
No? Is it good? Is it as good as it looks?
It's great?
Oh, I can't wait.
It's great. Everything about it is created.
I need to see it in theater. It doesn't like one I have to see any No.
I mean, you know, it's always fun to laugh with a big group of people, although by now it's probably thinned out. Yeah, and I was laughing a lot and people weren't laughing. Oh, I like that kind of one of those deals. Yeah, 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 Itler's 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, like, don't tell me any not some big reveal.
So they go to Switzerland. All apologies, it's really not a.
Big deal as long as it's not a big spoiler.
No, no, no, no, of course not.
Okay.
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's nice sure in the nineteen In May of nineteen forty, though, the Nazzis invaded Belgium, and so they moved to the Netherlands in nineteen forty one.
Where the Nazis already were. Yeah, I guess they really can't occupy it again.
Well in its home right, and they 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.
B aa aaar inn, I like it's probably Barn.
Oh yeah, I'll bet you just nailed it.
I think so. But Dutchess very strange. It is language, but it's supposed that's 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.
Yet 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 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 it was a very odd hybrid. It sounded like of several different things.
It's all old Celtic stuff.
Yeah, very unusual.
Gallic, gallic, Yeah, I think it's Gallic. It's the 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 you told me that he melted. My brain was so good all that. 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 thirteenth century Moorish castle from when the Moors conquered Spain.
It'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 explored the New World and all that stuff. Yeah, but this castle was done in these tiles that are noun for being some of the most beautiful geometric like Islamic patterns you've ever seen in your life. And they got to esher. 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 from Switzerland. I think to Belgium or maybe to Switzerland. That's when he was like, I am obsessed with these Now these tessellations.
Started drawing him. Jetted it too. It says that they worked together. So I didn't know that she was an artist.
Yeah, I didn't either.
But they World War two comes back around, will not comes back around. It never left, let's be honest. But Spain would devolve into civil war. And so this meant that he was kind of stuck in outside of Amsterdam for a little while longer. Yeah, he wasn't doing as much traveling.
No, he was in the Netherlands and he rekindled his friendship with Mosquita, his old mentor who had stayed in Netherlands this whole time. And Mosquita was Jewish and he was taken away by the Nazis. Eventually he was killed at Auschwitz, I believe, with his wife and their son was also killed at another concentration camp by the Nazis. And this really got to esher, like, this is one of his dear friends. And he had a work a
sketch of Mosquitos. 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 mosquitos that had a Nazi bootprint on it.
And that's what you were referenced earlier with your.
Google search mosquito bootprint.
Did you 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 mosquitos that had boor bootprint, and the Escher hung onto this his his entire life. It was very important to him.
And he was not.
A very flowery, like like passionate man or anything like that. I get the impression that he and this is esture I'm talking about, that he internalized a lot of stuff, and I think that him holding on to that piece of art was probably more significant than even it appears on the outside.
Yeah, and supposedly 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.
Oh oh, gotcha, gotcha, gotcha.
He didn't hide them from right, don't.
Tell the Jewish family that you're hiding over here.
No, that would have been weird. So maybe we should take a break now.
Oh, I think it's unraveled for the point the guys are yeah.
All right, okay, Chuck. So World War two kind of comes and goes around esher despite his best efforts to escape it, 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 because, 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 be inspired to keep making
these Italian landscapes. But Ed makes a really great point here that his Italian landscapes are very handsome works of art, very beautiful, my favorite, technically proficient. They're Chuck's favorite. But you would almost certainly have never seen them in your entire life now were it not for him moving from Italy, because in doing so he lost his source of inspiration and 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, 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 Escher was unlocked.
Yeah, because early and like a lot of artists early in their career, 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.
Arry, John Wayne Gacy, You're right, but you can very clearly see if you look at Mosquito's work that connection and the influence from him. Although Mosquita did a lot of sort of graphic portraits and things like that, whereas Esher didn't really worry too much about humans and faces.
Yeah, yeah, they were just kind of like almost afterthoughts.
But early on he did start experimenting with stuff that would later become sort of his hallmark. When he did do a 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 Various Stuteley points out that there's something about his style that 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 uneasy feeling, right. 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 unsettling 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 the mummified priests? Yeah, that was creepy and then one of them.
Isn't it more creepy to actually do that in real life to stand them up like that? And these little alcoves?
Oh? Yeah, absolutely sure.
He was just don't kill the messenger.
And he would have sometimes skulls featured in some of his work and stuff like that, like the one of the eye believe called eye right in the middle of the people is a skull staring back. So he had little touches like that without going full like you know, love Craftian.
Right or Goya or something like that.
And I don't even know, Bosh, I don't know who that is.
Sure you do, I'm just kidding, Okay, I know those people. Okay, So.
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 mcsher print and you 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 woodcut if you've ever made used a stamp or made a potato stamp as your kid.
You're 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 just take a step back and think about the eshers that you've seen before. Imagine that they were originally carved out of wood, and now imagine that to get even more detailing. Because you can't adjust how much ink a certain part of the woodblock gets. It's all going to get an even layer of ink. So to shade something you have to do cross hatching, lines, stippling
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 woodcuts this guy was doing.
Yeah, like that's sort of like a T shirt hippie exactly. 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 inc across so it's not you know, off by a centimeter right, because it would look bad.
So the woodcuts, especially as earlier woodcuts, you can tell their woodcuts.
They look like woodcuts. Some of them do not.
There's some of the Italian countryside that favorites are just yeah, are just astounding. And when you stop and think about the idea that they there's not a drawing that there wood cuts, multiple blocked woodcuts, 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. I know it talked about batikuing, but I also talked to in industrial arts. We did of lithography in that social experiment high school. Yeah, exactly, we did offset lithography, which basically, I mean that's the process today. I mean, that's how they make newspapers, posters, books, maps, kind of everything is with offset lithography.
It was in do you remember it was in the etch A sketch episode. Oh that's what Ohio Art originally did was lithography.
Okay, well this is this is pre like today, use like aluminum or some other kind of metal sheet and these emulsions and chemicals. Back then it was drawn onto limestone, a flat slab of limestone with a grease pencil, and then use a chemical treatment on the areas that basically water and ink 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 ink or is it the other way around?
No, I think they don't hold the a.
Yeah. Again, what you're doing is creating a negative image, just like the woodcut essentially.
Right, So you've got this 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 Esher's more 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 did it in reverse too, because just like with a woodblock, you have to create the negative of it, Yah, 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. Yes, you know, it's 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 move, 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 no such thing. There's original prints that he made, right And apparently you're.
Not going to 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 right where they intentionally damage it so that even if you got a hold of one of these things, and you were like, I'm.
Going to print me a brain new Esher.
There'd be like the like the negative image of Snegel Puss like comes through the hand drawing hands picture.
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 is going to be a print anyway.
What they told me it was an original.
You mean bikini lady on Corvette.
You can probably get the original of that at Spencer.
Probably could the original negative.
Bikini lady on Corvette. Man remember that Starfield with Lamborghini.
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 used to screenprint too, so did.
I Yeah, yeah, well actually the Monkeys T shirt was screen printing. I think can remember 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 screenprinted in industrial arts? Yes, okay, like you were you ever employed gainfully as a screen Oh? No?
Oh no?
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 you would draw the stuff or you would.
No, no, no, no, I would like burn the screens and everything and drag the ink through.
And you do that for a job, sure, well like high school?
No, this is is college.
What kind of dough do you make doing that?
Jack?
Yeah?
But it's fun. It's cool work, you know, you just listening to be in a few bucks pretty much hang out with some cool dudes, and you know's.
Yeah, yeah, I gotcha.
It's a good, 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, Katie Culp works, or at least she used to 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, It really is there a lot worse places to spend your time than a T shirt shop? So oh, another thing we should point out is that he did
do color occasionally, but color was a hole 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 mc yesher 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.
Snago puts on every single one of them.
And apparently 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 and 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, have they.
Yeah, it seems like he's being more appreciated as a truly great artist and less college dorm wall material.
Yeap.
In twenty 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 Banco to Brazil, which held their Magical World of Escher exhibit. Oh wow, five hundred and seventy thousand visitors about ten thousand a day.
Holy cow.
Yep.
So if you think lithography and woodcutting sounds difficult, we'll talk a minute about mesotint. That is sort of like woodcutting, 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 going to be white on the paper are blank on the paper. Right, it's the rough edges that hold the ink. So you cover the whole thing with ink, wipe it down. The smooth start parts
come clean. The rough stuff has the ink, and you can use this like this is this isn't like, oh look I'm made an X, right, this is like incredibly fine stippling is possible with these copper plates and all this mezotint And that I that you were talking about with the skull. If you go back and look at that, that was a mezzo tint.
Yes, it was de drop, very detailed cupped leaf showing a single drop of dew inside it, with all kinds of cool reflections. But Escher called this the black art. He only made eight of these because it is a real undertaking, and I think he's just he did a handful of him and then moved on to the far easier wood cutting.
Right right, He's like, oh, I came back, baby.
All right, We'll take a break and then we'll come back and pick up with his life story again, which is I believeably left off in what end of world War two sounds right, all right, Okay, world War Two is over. Mc esher 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 this makes him out to be. Like, yeah, he's got some renown in the Netherlands, there's certain circles of bits. Yeah, 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 are 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. Yeah, like you could describe this work of art as a formula. That is what mc esher was able to do. He was able to take math and translate it into a visual art.
Yeah. And you know, remember what you said earlier, This is where we are in his life. Where he is he is not in the Italian countryside.
He's been ripped from its bodice, So.
His muse is gone and he is now looking inward for his inspiration in his own unique brain.
He's being forced into his own bodice. Face first.
This is where he starts with these tessellations, more elaborate geometric shapes. He's doing the lizards and the birds and the insects. His tessellations, really really cool stuff. 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 in maths, And he does so, and that taught
him a lot. And then he learned about the seventeen wallpaper groups, which is so dense that I, you know, how much do we even want to talk about it?
Well, 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. I usually right, Escher couldn't understand it mathematically.
Yeah, it was proved out twice independently that there are seventeen wallpapers 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 within its walls. 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 seventeen wallpaper groups are or what they mean mathematically, but he understood them intuitively, and as he became friends with mathematicians know about mid career, 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, you know, I mean, I guess he was real cocky. Yeah, he wasn't really just kidding.
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 like, I'm drawing this stuff from my creative brain on limestone on limestone, cutting it out of wood. So I think he appreciated the way they coalesced. But and he was very like you said, most of his friends were mathematicians I think later in life. Who did he have Penroses? Yeah, Roger and Lionel Pinrose, which I
love how it's described here, father and son mathematician team. Yeah, yeah, you know those.
They were matching dolphin shorts, oh man, part of their uniform.
I wish people still wore those. Yeah, did you ever wear those?
No, we were a little before my time.
Well, they were for joggers and runners.
Yeah, and it twenty eleven and who do I forgot about that?
Yeah? That is what Hooters waitresses.
Orange shorts with remember bronze panny house.
There Yeah, and then chunky white socks.
Yeah, and it was a very back high tops.
It was bizarre.
Interesting.
Look somebody put that together and not a woman. 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 wing do you want to get?
They 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.
Uh, 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 ask them if it's okay if I eat.
Like if you bring food on yep. I don't bring food onto.
A flight sometimes, dude, you just have to. Yeah, it's a long flight.
And sure, I'm not going to run out of turkey wraps like in the first half a second.
So you just pull out your what my kung pow out of your pocket you had just in case they're out of turkey wraps?
Yea, not even in the containers, just in my pocket.
Oh goodness. So I thought this part was sort of amusing 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 and dug up a bunch of trash and said I will draw chaos, and it ended up being if
you go and look at it. There's like a broken bottle, broken eggshell, an open sardine tin and broken clay pipe and some other refuse drawn to like perfect or I guess woodcutter lithographed with perfect, beautiful precision.
Right was chaos his interpretation of it.
He just couldn't do it.
He was very much preoccupied with Kassi. He has a very famous quote, probably his most famous quat quote, we adore chaos because we'd 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 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. 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 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 the sphere. Yeah, perfectly, but again you have to stop and remind yourself this is a two dimensional image I'm looking at right, 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 on in life. And I'll bet that's spectacular to see too. He made it, what a three dimensional wood carving of it, basically proving that his two dimensional drawing was accurate. Yeah, because he made it in the three dimensions, that's awesome.
Yeah, he was just showing off towards the end there.
I like reptiles that's going 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 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 then, 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. Okay, dear, here's your t Yeah. And that sort of brings us too. With the reptiles. We need to talk a little bit about illusion 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.
That's a neat one.
Yeah, it's really cool. I like that one too, 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.
Yeah. Relativity is the one with the staircases.
Yeah, 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 mathemagician.
Team and speaking of the Penrose as they did.
I'd just say, mathemagician, I just invented something I.
Did that's amazing, completely by accident the Penroses. That would be great, mathemagician.
Yeah, I bet that's something four right.
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 Esher 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
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.
Yeah, 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 one that you're just talking about upstairs downstairs, they that was supposedly based on some a staircase in his school. Oh really, which suddenly says quite a bit about his psychology, don't you think?
Well? How so?
Well?
I mean, like, these students aren't going anywhere, they're not even human. There's centipedes with human faces, gotcha, gotcha.
And they're kind of trapped in this well.
You could definitely call like a 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 a little bit in Europe, but he did one in Belgium in nineteen fifty. 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.
Yo.
Yeah. Then that led to a larger exhibition at the International Mathematical Congress in fifty four. Flash forward to sixty six, he was featured in Mathematical Games Column and Scientific American by Martin Gardner mathemagician, I guarantee you that's a thing. 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 at Graham.
Nash Graham Nash Mick Jagger sent him a fan ladder and made the mistake of calling him by his first name. Oh really, Jessher did not appreciate Stanley Kubrick tried to recruit him to make two thousand and one in Space Odyssey, 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 kind of like, no, I'm good over here with my 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 all over.
He was huge, Yeah, dorm room huge.
Four hundred and forty eight works. Then this doesn't count all the sketches and drafts. These are like the actual final works, right, And like we said earlier, he dies nineteen seventy two of 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 eighteen ninety nine, Well, great grandkids maybe.
Yeah, Okay, I guess if his kids were born in the nineteen twenties, Yeah, contemporaries of our parents maybe.
Sure. The old stirs Yeah boomers.
Hey, boomer, Boomer. Okay, boom hey boomer. So get that right.
In that Journey to Infinity movie, apparently all three of his children appear in it.
Oh really, 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 looked a little bit like him. Yeah, it's not expecting that, nop. So there's mc es sure, that's right. Speaking of not expecting that, Babe on Corvette Sure and Hooters air Line made appearances in the mcs. You're 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, I've been listening to your show since twenty eleven. I even seeing you. 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. Oh yeah, that's how it works.
Sure, Sorry, 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. We don't do that. No, 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 just so. That's why we only put out the one, right, 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. Nice, you were one of the few people that can keep his attention. I never thought I would write, but as a science teacher, you said something recently that'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. Really good tip, guys. Thanks for sharing that. Thanks for all your work, and now I will 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 I with the heart, maybe with a little reflection on the side of the heart. You remember that one two curve lines top with topped and I guess bottomed with.
A straight line.
I think I know what you're talking about, Caro.
I'll show you.
Oh boy, since we just dis oh oh sure that yeah, yeah.
It almost looks like a bent Roman numeral to inside the heart. That's the reflection of light. That's where the light's coming from.
It's beautiful.
Thanks to Escher reference.
I'll treasure that.
You're welcome check. I wasn't going to give it to you, but now.
I have to just sign it first.
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