Book: The World of M.C. Escher
Author: M.C. Escher (Contributor), J.L. Locher (Contributor), C.H.A. Broos (Contributor), G.W. Locher (Contributor), H.S.M. Coxeter (Contributor)
Find Online: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1454862.The_World_of_M_C_Escher
Date Read: March 2019
Before he died, my dad passed on his love of abstract art to me. My first best friend in college, Eric, rekindled that love for surreal and abstract artwork for me by reminding me of M.C. Escher and his mathematically-informed vision of the world. Now, almost a decade later, this book helped me to get to know Escher not only in terms of the visual work he produced, but also in terms of how he spoke about it.
The bringing to life of an abstract structure of contiguous repetitions produces individualization of this structure, which, carried to its logical conclusion, means that it will ultimately become finite.
— J.L. Locher
Observer and creator are not separate but indivisibly connected.
— J.L. Locher
No one can draw a line that is not a boundary line; every line splits a singularity into a plurality.
— M. C. Escher, “Approaches to Infinity”
You are now departing with a package of illusions of an illusion.
— M. C. Escher
He also believed. That things and beings could occur that do not exist now but, on the basis of what we think and know, are conceivable and therefore potentially realizable.
Because the artist has a creative power at his disposal, he can act as creator of conceivable but nonexistent beings and situations.
— G. W. Locher
In the same way as Escher’s figures develop and move themselves via the artist according to a plan implicit in the structure, myths, according to Lévi-Strauss (“Le cruller et le cuit.”), take a form in a way determined by certain structures in the thinking of peoples with no involvement in their conscious minds.
“Les mythes se pensent dans les hommes et a sur insu”