MC Escher and His Trippy Art

We love us some MC Escher. Turns out his story is pretty fascinating too. Tune in today. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of Five
Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hey, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles w Chuck Bryant, there's
Jerry over there, and this is Stuff You Should Know.
The Arts C edition is Jerry broom Tone. Roland. Yeah,

(00:23):
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 Jark. First, I think it's the
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

(00:45):
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

(01:06):
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

(01:26):
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.

(01:46):
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

(02:09):
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,

(02:30):
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

(02:51):
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

(03:15):
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

(03:37):
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,

(03:59):
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.

(04:19):
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

(04:42):
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

(05:03):
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

(05:25):
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,

(05:46):
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

(06:10):
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

(06:32):
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,

(06:57):
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

(07:17):
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,

(07:40):
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,

(08:02):
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

(08:25):
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

(08:45):
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

(09:09):
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

(09:31):
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.

(09:53):
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.

(10:16):
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?

(10:38):
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.

(11:00):
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

(11:22):
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

(11:47):
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.

(12:08):
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

(12:28):
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

(12:53):
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

(13:15):
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

(13:37):
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

(14:00):
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,

(14:22):
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

(14:42):
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

(15:05):
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

(15:26):
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

(15:47):
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

(16:09):
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

(16:33):
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,

(16:56):
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,

(17:19):
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

(17:40):
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

(18:02):
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

(18:26):
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

(18:47):
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

(19:09):
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.

(19:31):
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

(19:54):
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

(20:16):
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

(20:38):
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.

(21:00):
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

(21:21):
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

(21:44):
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,

(22:07):
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

(22:29):
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

(22:54):
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

(23:16):
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,

(23:37):
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

(23:58):
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,

(24:21):
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

(24:41):
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.

(25:12):
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

(25:32):
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

(25:53):
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

(26:16):
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

(26:38):
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

(26:58):
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

(27:19):
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,

(27:46):
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.

(28:08):
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

(28:29):
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

(28:53):
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,

(29:16):
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.

(29:38):
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

(30:02):
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

(30:22):
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

(30:45):
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

(31:06):
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

(31:29):
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,

(31:50):
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,

(32:17):
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

(32:37):
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

(33:00):
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

(33:24):
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

(33:44):
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

(34:05):
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

(34:27):
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

(34:51):
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

(35:11):
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,

(35:32):
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

(35:53):
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.

(36:14):
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,

(36:34):
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

(36:57):
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

(37:19):
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

(37:40):
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

(38:01):
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

(38:23):
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

(38:45):
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

(39:07):
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

(39:32):
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

(39:54):
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

(40:15):
I believably left off in what end of World War two?
Sounds right? All right? Okay, world War two is over?

(40:44):
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,

(41:07):
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

(41:30):
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

(41:51):
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?

(42:13):
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

(42:34):
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

(42:59):
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

(43:19):
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

(43:41):
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

(44:02):
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

(44:24):
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

(44:46):
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

(45:09):
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.

(45:31):
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

(45:52):
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

(46:13):
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

(46:34):
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.

(46:55):
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

(47:17):
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.

(47:38):
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

(48:00):
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.

(48:24):
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

(48:44):
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.

(49:05):
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

(49:28):
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,

(49:48):
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

(50:11):
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

(50:32):
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

(50:55):
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

(51:18):
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

(51:43):
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

(52:04):
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

(52:28):
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

(52:48):
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.

(53:10):
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

(53:30):
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

(53:53):
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

(54:16):
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

(54:43):
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

(55:05):
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

(55:27):
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

(55:48):
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

(56:08):
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

(56:32):
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

(56:54):
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