Escher Enjoyment

Rick and I ventured down to St. Petersburg today to return to the Dali Museum.  We have seen the Dali exhibit numerous times, so we did not spend any time in that part of the Museum.  Instead, we devoted the day to seeing the visiting exhibit of the works of M. C. Escher.

I have long been a fan of Escher; in fact, I have several books on his works back in Green Bay.  I used some of Escher's famous illustrations -- including "Relativity," "Heaven and Hell," "still Life and Street" and "Drawing Hands" -- when I taught a unit on perception in Oral Interpersonal Communication.

One of Escher's most famous works.

Seeing Escher's work in real life was delightful.  The exhibit covered each period of his life and included all of his most famous works. He was a master at manipulating shapes, at illustrating what is physically impossible, and at creating images that challenge the viewer to figure out what is "figure" and what is "ground" since the image and the background change depending on where one looks.  What really surprised me was the size of some of his woodcuts and lithographs.  He had more smaller works (around 18 x 24), and most of his larger works were no more than 3' x 4'. What amazed me was the amount of detail that he was able to put into each piece.

One self-portrait of him looking into a reflective sphere was probably only 5 inches across!  I had heard that his woodcut "Metamorphosis II" covered an entire wall, and it did. The print is 33 blocks combined to stretch over 12 feet.  But once again I was surprised to see that it was only about 8" tall.

After an audio tour of the exhibit, Rick and I went to the car to get our picnic cooler.  We learned on our first trip to the Dali that their cafeteria offered a small selection of mostly Spanish cuisine that I did not care for, and it was terribly expensive.  Since the Dali is right on the bayshore, we walked a little away from the Museum toward some shady benches.  Sadly, once we got there, we discovered a disheveled homeless man sleeping on the benches.  We did not feel comfortable eating our lunch there, so we retreated back to the Museum grounds.  Lunch outdoors under a big umbrella on the Museum terrace with a wonderful cooling breeze blowing was delightful.

While we ate lunch amidst the Museum gardens,
I noticed this well-behaved lizard that heeded
the advice on the sign and climbed on the sign
itself instead.

After lunch we returned to the Escher exhibit to watch the entire hour-long movie. The exhibit was a delight to see, and since Escher lived into the 1970's, the movie that the Museum offered about his life contained several clips of him working and talking about his work.

Seeing how his work was influenced by the locations in which he lived was fascinating.  Some of his best work came from his time in southern Italy, but the family had to flee from that country as Italy's politics got swept up in the late 30's with the coming war.  Moves with his young family to Switzerland, Spain, and the Netherlands all resulted in different types of works and levels of production.

If you are unfamiliar with Escher's work, do yourself a favor and look at what he created. I am sure you will like something that you like.  He never considered himself an "artist"; instead, he was trained and made his living as a "graphic artist" for over 50 years.

M. C. Escher's 1937 woodcut "Still Life and Street."