Material Detail

In 1956 the Dutch graphic artist Maurits Cornelis Escher (1898–1972) made an unusual lithograph with the title Prentententoonstelling. It shows a young man standing in an exhibition gallery, viewing a print of a Mediterranean seaport. As his eyes follow the quayside buildings shown on the print from left to right and then down, he discovers among them the very same gallery in which he is standing. A circular white patch in the middle of the lithograph contains Escher’s monogram and signature. It amazed me how he did design of the white patch in the middle, before i read the the material i would think he just painted it. I like the mathematics he involved in the piece. I like the idea of the mathematics used on the picture becuase it can be viewed as drawn on a certain elliptic curve over the field of complex numbers and deduce that an idealized version of the picture repeats itself in the middle. More precisely, it contains a copy of itself, rotated clockwise by 157.6255960832. . . degrees and scaled down by a factor of 22.5836845286. Its amazing how we can put an idea that will make it possible to make an annular bulge "a cyclic expansion without beginning or end". Another good example is the way one transforms a single closed loop, counterclockwise around the center, from the curved world to the straight world. It reflects the invariance of the straight picture under a blowup by a factor of 256. I like the idea how such phenomenon takes place if we do not walk around the center of the piece. The idea that we have the factor of 256 will take us to make something so beautiful like the pictures that escher has done. Another idea and figure that amazed me was figure A5x5 square transformed to the curved world, i like it because the lines line up straight with each other and we can still make the curves on the picture event though the lines themselve dont curve. So every thing that escher done gave me an idea in how art work can look better than if it was just drawn on the paper without making some kind of chart or graph and mathematics.