Sunday Squee: Escher

The Sunday Squee is about things that make me happy and excited. From books to movies to television shows to podcasts, I'll highlight less commonly known things as a way to share what I love. If you want to join in the Sunday Squee, please link back to me, magnifying both of our joy.

The LEA creation Metamorphose reminded me of one of my favorite artists - M. C. Escher. He was an impressive draftsman who turned his skill toward my favorite direction - bending the surface of reality to make things more interesting. The transition of things from flat to depthed and back to flat again is a recurring theme in his more surreal art - lizards leap out of art, and hands draw each other, water flows downwards to fall back into it's own source. It's the detail which makes his art - the precise recreation of light to make something impossible seem somehow inevitable.

Most amazing, most of his art weren't drawings as we think of them. He worked in wood cut, lithograph, and mezzotint - all of them forms of printing rather than drawing with pencil on paper. His preference by far was lithograph; one draws onto a stone surface with a greasy material - either a pencil or crayon - and thenw ork with the material on the surface of the stone until the final effect is created. Then the surface of the stone is treated to preserve the areas of white on the stone before a solvent is added to eat away at the places where the greasy material was - Phil Sanders at MOMA did a video showing the process of making a lithograph and the prints which result, and it is astonishing to watch the image vanish into a ghost only to rise again with the application of ink. Escher's Metamorphose was a block print, not a lithograph, but I think the sheer heavy deliberateness of the medium carries through even when it's transformed into digital, and that's part of what I like about it.

Every life needs some solid surreality.

( More pictures here. )

Credits:

Skin: Izzie's, Irene
Tattoo: Folly, Tintable Rainbow Sheen
Hair: Asset, Lime Hair
Eyes: .:Soul:., Oculos
Eyelashes 1: SLink, Mesh Lashes
Eyelashes 2: Flugeln Brise, 05-A
Wings: Deviance, Sidhe
Body: SLink, Hands, Feet
Nails: La Boheme, Ancient Tides
Outfit: Spyralle, Tarja

Poses: Grafica Location: METAMORPHOSE
Windlight Settings: Sim Default
Water Settings: Sim Default

Photographed by Deoridhe Quandry
Post processing: Cropping