Howard Robinson

Introduction to drawing
Written Report
Maurits Cornelis Escher, better known as M.C. Escher or simply Mauk to his family and
friends, was a graphic artist from the Netherlands.

He was even awarded the Knighthood of

the Order of Orange-Nassau in 1955 for his artwork. He is most famous for his impossible
constructions and Transforming tessellations Prints. His work involved a lot of geometric shapes.
His impossible constructions, for example, were mostly buildings and other shapes that could not
exist in our three dimensional world. Also his transforming tessellations were also geometric
shapes albeit two dimensional ones. Early on in his career M.C. Escher was influenced by nature.
He would draw plants, insects and landscapes. Even later on in his career he was influenced by
nature. Most of his tessellations were animals such as fish, lizards, and birds, He also liked to
include various animals in his mathematical, and architectural works. He will have a lizard
within an odd mathematical shape or strange creatures wondering the impossible strange world
that he creates. In his life time M.C. Escher make over 2448 are pieces. 448 of them where
lithographs, woodcuts, wood engraving and the rest of them were drawings and sketches.
Maurits Cornelis Escher was born on 17 June 1898 and died in1972. Leeuwarden,
Friesland was his home town and he grew up in a house that is now, part of the Princessehof
Ceramics Museum. He was the youngest child of George Arnold Escher who was a civil
engineer and, a foreign advisor, to the Japanese. His mother was not George Arnold Eschers first
wife but his second. When Maurits Cornelis Escher was just five years old, his family and him
moved to Arnhem. He was such a sickly child that, at age seven, he had to be placed in a special

school. He was not very good in school, and had extremely poor grades. He fails not only second
grade, but his high school exams. Despite this he was enrolled in the Technical College of Delft
from 1919 to 1922 and then he was enrolled in the School for Architecture and Decorative Arts
in Haarlem. After only about seven days of attending the School for Architecture and Decorative
Art, he informed his father that he did not want to study architecture anymore, but graphic art.
The reason being that he showed his drawings and linoleum cuts to his graphic teacher Samuel
Jessurun de Mesquita. Jessurum de Mesquita was very impressed by his work, and suggested that
he pursue graphic art as a carrier.
1922 was an important year for Maurits Cornelis Escher; because this was the year he
traveled threw Italy. While he was in Italy he visited Florence, San Gimignano, Volterra, Siena,
and Ravello. While he was in Italy he met the women that would later become his wife in 1924,
Jetta Umiker. They moved to Rome and stayed there until 1935. During those eleven years of
romance, Jetta Umiker and Escher would travel each year throughout Italy. Escher would draw
and sketch for various prints he would make when he later returned home. Jetta, and M.C. Escher
had 3 kids together: Arthur, Giorgio, and Jan Escher. He didnt just visit Italy in 1922. He also
visited Spain as well. While he was in Spain he visited Madrid, Toledo, and Granada. While in
Spain he got inspired to do tessellation art. He was impressed by the Moorish architecture of the
fourteenth-century Alhambra. The intricate decorative designs of the Alhambra, based on
geometrical symmetries featuring interlocking, and repetitive patterns in the tiles and sculpted
into the ceiling and walls, triggered his interest in tessellation. M.C. Escher is even quoted saying
It remains an extremely absorbing activity, a real mania to which I have become addicted, and
from which I sometimes find it hard to tear myself away.

Maurits, and M.C. Escher moved out of Rome in 1935 simply due to politics. The
national fascist party led by Benito Amilcare Andrea Mussolini. M.C. Escher was not a fan of
politics at all, and found it hard to get involved with any particular party, but when his oldest son
Giorgio was forced to wear a Ballila uniform in school, at the age of nine, the family left Italy
and moved to Chteau-d'x, Switzerland. M.C. Escher was did not like Switzerland. He just was
not inspired the same way he was as when he was in Italy, so his family and he only stayed for
two years before moving yet again in 1937. This time to Uccle a suburb of Brussel. The Escher
family only stayed in Brussel for four years before moving again, not because they wanted to
they quite liked it in Brussel, but were force to move in 1941 due to World War II. Most of
Escher's best-known works date from this period. The somewhat cloudy, cold and wet weather of
the Netherlands allowed him to focus intently on his work, because it was way too rainy and wet
to venture outside.
From 1953 onward, Escher lectured widely. In 1962 a series of lectures to North America
were canceled after M.C. Escher got too ill to create artwork. Fortunately the illustrations and
text for the lectures were published as part of his book Escher on Escher.
In July 1969 M.C. Escher created the last work of his lie. It was a large woodcut with
threefold rotational symmetry called Snakes. It featured snakes winding through a pattern of
linked rings. These shrank to infinity toward the center and the edge of a circle. It was extremely
elaborate; being printed using three blocks, all of them rotated three times about the center of the
image and precisely aligned to avoid gaps and overlaps, totaling nine prints. The image
encapsulates Escher's love of symmetry, of interlocking patterns, and mathematics. The care
Escher took in creating and printing this woodcut can be seen in a video recording. Three years
later in 1972 M.C. Escher passes away. He is buried at the New Cemetery in Baarn, before that

he moved to the Rosa Spier Huis in Laren in 1970, an artists' retirement home. There he had his
own studio.
Escher's work is inescapably mathematical. This has caused a disconnect between his
full-on popular fame with the common crowd and the complete lack of fame with which he was
viewed in the art world. His originality and mastery of graphic techniques was respected by the
art world at the time but his work has been thought too intellectual. Later on however art
movements such as conceptual art have reversed the art world's attitude to intellectuality but this
did not change how the art world saw Escher because traditional critics still disliked his themes
and his use of perspective. However, these same qualities made his work very popular to the
public.
Escher is not the first artist to explore mathematical themes however. Parmigianino, who
lived from 1503 to 1540, had explored spherical geometry and reflection in his 1524 Self-portrait
in a Convex Mirror. This particular piece dipeptide his own image in a curved mirror. William
Hogarth's also did False Perspective before Eschers playful exploration of errors in perspective.
Another early artistic, Giovanni Battista Piranesi created dark fantastical prints such as The
Drawbridge in his Carceri sequence depict perspectives into complex architecture with many
stairs and ramps.it can also be argued that the 20th century movements of Cubism, explored
Escher-like ways of looking at the world with multiple simultaneous viewpoints. However,
Escher may have had allot in common with Magritte's surrealism, he did not make contact with
any of these movements.

Eschers artwork can be found all over the world. He Escher intellectual property is
controlled by the M.C. Escher Company. Exhibitions of his artworks are managed separately by
the M.C. Escher Foundation. The primary institutional collections of original works by M.C.
Escher are the Escher Museum in The Hague; the National Gallery of Art (Washington, DC); the
National Gallery of Canada (Ottawa);the Israel Museum (Jerusalem); and the Huis ten Bosch
(Nagasaki, Japan) prints can also be bought from his website.
Escher was a very inspirational artist, especially for illusionists, and mathematical and
scientific illustrators.

I personally really enjoy M.C. Eschers work. His ability to create buildings that could not
possibly exist yet still look and real yet magically impossible is really inspiring. To me that is
one of the coolest things about art, being able to create things that could not possibly exist in this
world yet still be believable on the page. I also really enjoy his tessellation work, especially his
ones feature more realistic textures and shading like Angles and Demons. My personal favorite
of his works is probably Curl-up. In this page he describes an imaginary animal called
pedalternorotandomovens centroculatus which he created to fill the lack of wheels in nature. As
zoology major I find that really clever and funny.