Selects: MC Escher and His Trippy Art

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Hi everybody.

Chuck here on a Saturday.

I'm just sitting here drawing cubes and things with my poor artwork, but you know who's

really good at this?

I'm Emcee Escher, and this episode from December 2019 gets all into the life of the great artist

and the title is Emcee Escher and his trippy art.

I hope you enjoy it.

Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of I Heart Radio.

Hey, and welcome to the podcast.

I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant, and there's Jerry over there, and

this is Stuff You Should Know, the arts see edition.

This is Jerry Rume-Town Rowland.

Yeah, I think that's make-believe stuff.

Rume-Town?

Yeah, she might as well be like, let me capture a few fairies in this mason jar first.

I think it's the same thing.

We made me do this in the final edit.

Fairies.

I don't know what it is about to explain to everyone.

Rume-Town is, you do this on film sets and in studios where you just make everyone sit

completely silently while you capture the sound of the room, so I guess you can, what

do you do with that, Jerry?

Do you layer it in?

In case you need it 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, it's really hard, especially on a film set when there's

like 50 people standing around, being completely silent, I went farting.

I suspect it's strictly a power trip.

You think so?

By the person calling for a room-tone.

That's what I think.

I'm going to start doing that in my house when things get out of hand.

Room-tone!

Right?

You think that works?

Don't make me bust out the room-tone on you.

Well, since we're talking about this now, I was going to say, since we're talking about

room-tone, obviously the topic today is MC Escher, who is well known for going berserk

anytime someone asked him to be quiet for a room-tone.

She would trash chairs, grab reptiles straight out of the two dimensions and throw them into

the third dimension, just to all sorts of weird stuff.

That's funny.

Did you think so?

That was a joke just for you.

Yeah, so everyone knows MC Escher, if you've ever been to college or taken drugs or sold

drugs to somebody in college, then you've probably seen hands drawing hands or, I mean, that's

not what the name of that one was, but it's called drawing hands.

So is it, or some of the more famous ones are these impossible rooms, like stairs that

lead to sideways stairs, but you got to 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.

Sure.

It's constant.

Or I'm a big fan of that one self-portrait he did in the-

With the sphere?

Yeah.

The mirror sphere?

Mirror sphere?

Yeah.

It's cool.

It's 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 one of the, like, coolest, more innovative artists out there.

Yeah.

And there's a great factoid that I hope I'll hold till the end or not the end, but kind

of where it falls in our-

What does factoid mean against?

I mean, you've killed 10% of all the facts.

That's right.

And this is just one of the 10% remains.

That's right.

Okay.

Gotcha.

So, one of the things to talk about MCS sure that I found was that if you were impressed

by his work, prepare to get exponentially more impresses, we talk about how he made

those works too.

Well, that's the fact of the showroom for me.

Oh, okay.

That's the factoid you're-

Yeah, we got a hold on to that.

Oh, sure, sure, sure.

I was just teasing it a little bit.

I didn't know that's what you were talking about, although I should have guessed.

Yeah.

So, this is us talking about an artist, which means that we should probably talk about

that artist being born.

And in the case of MC Escher, whose name, by the way, was Moritz, Cornelius?

I want to say Cornelius, but there's no you in there.

I think Cornelius?

Sure.

Escher.

I nailed the last name.

The last name.

That's right.

I missed spoke on name.

Oh, you didn't say name.

I said, I 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 MC and then Escher, born June 17th, 1898, not 1989, as the grabs to put it.

Yeah.

He's like, here's some numbers.

He was born in Leeuwarden, Netherlands, grew up in Arnhem, which is about 60 miles southeast

of Amsterdam.

Is that right?

Yeah.

Okay.

I mapped all this stuff out.

Nice.

All in kind of that general area.

You went on a little Google tour?

Sure.

Sure.

And he signed, even from early on as MCE, he signed his paintings, although people called

him Mock, M-A-U-K, friends and family.

Right.

And he didn't mean anything, Ed points out, but it's just like, you know, an affectionate

term for Moritz.

Yeah.

Is it Moritz?

Probably Moritz.

Moritz, Cornelius Escher.

But it could also go the way of Moritz.

So is it Moritz?

Moritz.

I don't know.

I wish I knew.

Well, what we do know is that, in this, we should put a pin-in because it sort of plays

a big part in how he pursued his art, but his dad had some money.

He was a rich kid, for sure.

Which really helps, as we'll see, as he's traipsing 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.

And apparently, he also didn't consider himself much of an artist, although he engaged

in art, like he did produce art.

From a very young age, he was terrible in school, except at math and at 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 his son consoled

himself by producing a lino type of a sunflower.

That's how he made himself feel better after failing out of school.

Well, and he was somewhat adept at math early on, but it's interesting.

His work is highly mathematical, as far as art goes.

But later on in life, when he was confronted with real mathematicians, he would sort of

be like, nah, not me, man, like I'm an artist, I'm not that kind of mathematician.

So yes, but he was, most of his friends were 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 drugs.

That came later.

That came later, running out real popular.

But I saw that somebody made a movie called Journey Into Infinity, a documentary, a full

link documentary.

I believe the whole thing's on YouTube.

And it starts out, the trailer starts out with Graham Nash saying, hey, I called up MC Esher

one day just to say, Mr. Esher, I think you're a really great artist.

That's all I 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, because he spoke to him directly.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, it's crazy.

I mean, not to spoil anything, but he died in 1972, just 73.

So if he would have lived to his mid 80s, which is somewhat reasonable, he would have

been alive in the 80s, which just seemed so weird.

That does seem kind of weird, because he seems counter-cultural for sure.

Even though his personality was not very counter-cultural, and he didn't really have much love

for hippies.

In fact, he later said that the hippies in San Francisco are legally making copies of

my work.

He didn't exactly follow the normal usual beat throughout his lifetime.

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 a square joke, but it's not coming to me.

Remember that show, square peg, square peg, square?

Yeah.

Square pegs.

It's here at Jessica Parker.

Well, she and that.

Mm-hmm.

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's been her co-starring in Plaza Suite, and the El Simons Plaza Suite.

Very nice.

Very excited about that.

Oh, but I'm trying to align it with a Bonnie Prince Billy show, but they're like a

week apart.

And I'm like, I can't just stay in New York for a week.

There's a lot of time to kill, especially when there's hourly flights between Atlanta

and New York.

I know.

I may just go see Bonnie Prince Billy and come home, because he didn't play much.

But that's a story for another day.

All right.

So he goes to school at Technical College of Delft, 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 Billy's playing.

He's at Town Hall, actually.

Oh, is that right?

Yeah.

We played there.

That's right.

We got our stink on that joint.

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.

Sure.

If you're that kind of dude that might be lucrative.

So he said, hey, you like to draw shapes.

Why don't you go study architecture?

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

Chester and 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 Escher's art and said, you don't need to go into architecture.

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 designing.

Yeah.

It really, really is.

And the early, you know, 1920s was probably like, is that even a thing?

Right.

That sounds made up.

Yeah.

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, he'd just go do architecture.

Right.

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 going to make signs.

Right.

Or post his stamps or Christmas paper, which he did later on.

That's right.

Tell you made a little bit of dough.

So in the early 1920s, he started on his sort of 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 Spain at the Alhambra, and then just traveling through Southern Italy

through the countryside.

Yeah.

He just fell in love with Italy.

Yeah.

This is one that didn't bare fruit right away.

But he was really fascinated by these mosaics and tessellations, which are described as.

Okay.

They are repeating designs that interlock with 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.

I've seen the Escher fish sort of tessellation, the white fish and the black fish kind of working

in one another.

Yeah.

That's a perfect example.

And he would do this a lot later on if you've ever played Cubbert.

Yeah.

Those Cubes are 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 he loved it.

Loved it.

I mean, like he went to Italy and was like, this is my home.

Yeah.

And he was quoted at one point in time as saying, like, he never wanted to become an Italian

among Italians.

Yeah.

He liked being a stranger, but he loved Italy, which is an interesting thing to say.

I'm like, exactly sure what it means.

I think what he was saying was he likes being a visitor to Italy, rather than.

There's a certain amount of responsibility that comes with being one of us, you know what

I mean?

Sure.

Whereas if you can be like that guy over there who will accept him, we're not going to

throw rocks at him every time we see him or anything like that and we'll take his

money and maybe even say hi to him or whatever, but we'll leave him alone.

We won't include him in our expectations of what it means to be a local.

Gotcha.

That's what I 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

before he started doing the like trippy three-dimensional hands-drawing hands and stuff

when he was doing country sides, 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 you look at these, when you say Italian still lives of country sides, what

came to mind for me were these beautiful, lush, colorful recreations of a country side.

When you look at these, they still look very much like in the MC Esher style that we all

know.

Yeah.

Very clearly a lot of them too.

They're beautiful.

Yeah, they're black and white and then shades of gray, which is all just shading, right?

Yeah.

But they are beautiful in their way, lovely even.

I like this stuff more than the trippy stuff.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah, I mean, this is something I would put in my wall.

You're an art snob.

You're like, oh, I only like Esher's early Italian landscapes.

Oh, man.

You take that trippy stuff for Graham Nash.

I'm so ashamed.

No, I think it's great, Chuck.

You have totally right.

Totally right, yourself.

But they are gorgeous.

And then in 1923, he met his wife.

His name was Jetta.

Jetta Umiker.

That's right.

Very nice.

Thank you.

She was swiss.

I learned from the best.

They met her in Italy, but she was swiss and she went home and they sent a bunch of

love letters.

It's a sweet story.

I'm sure an MCC Esher movie would be pretty cool.

Somebody wrote a script, or did they wrote a dissertation about the process of writing

a script about MC Esher?

It's from University of Texas.

They wrote it in 2017.

I can't remember the name of it, but just look up, oh, just some random stuff comes up.

If you look up, Mesquita Bootprint, which will come up later.

All right.

But if you search that on Google, it brings up, have you ever done that?

Have you ever been like, I'm bored?

And 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 to trick it.

So maybe you'll type in a weird word, or the first three letters of a word or something

like that.

And weird stuff will start to come.

Well, if you type in Mesquita Bootprint, probably only like the first three of them pertain

to MCS or on the rest are just a random assortment of links.

I remember early in the days of Google, 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.

Uh-huh, yeah.

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 a lot of ways to time.

But I remember there's some guy did like a Ted talk about that.

Oh, really?

Yeah.

Well, maybe I'm the dummy.

No, no.

No, it was.

Man.

I mean, look at me.

I do like MC Escher's early work.

I think that's awesome.

I mean, what taste?

Yeah.

You know?

So he meets and gets married.

She returns to Italy and they marry in 1924.

Do you mean Jetta Eumicher?

That's right.

Uh, she would become Jetta Escher.

Jetta Eumicher Escher.

And that son named Georgio later had sons Arthur and Jan.

And uh, they were still just sort of traveling and his dad was even though he was married.

His dad was still foot in the bill.

Escher's dad.

MC Escher's father.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

But you know, I was thinking about it.

I was like, gosh.

You know.

Get a benefactor.

Wake up every day and look at yourself in the mirror.

But if you're looking in the mirror sphere.

Right.

How do you?

And then how do you draw it?

So amazingly, um, the, uh, the, the father, Escher's father though, they're 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, this is what I want

for you.

And that's like, that's how it went down.

That's awesome.

That's the pinnacle of what a parent can do for their child in, in a lot of ways.

No, totally.

I agree.

You know, it's not like, Hey, why don't you go, you know, take up heroin and here's

a bunch of money to for you to like lay around in Ibiza.

True.

I want to know more.

I'm not, I hope I'm not coming across a cynical, but I wonder if some of this was like,

he'll come around if I, you know, to architecture or whatever.

Right.

You kept waiting for the part where his father cuts them off.

I was.

His father apparently wouldn't like that.

All right.

I know how you feel.

I'm not trying to talk you into my way of thinking.

I'm just saying like I had, I started out thinking the same way you did and then something

happened.

I was like, Oh, it was actually really neat of his dad.

It was.

It all seems about bored.

Yeah.

So World War II has a profound effect on Escher and his work in 1935.

He learned that they were making his nine-year-old son, Georgio, Marchin, fascist youth parades.

And he said, Pack your bags.

We're going to Switzerland.

That is the appropriate response to that news.

Yeah.

We're getting out of here.

Marchin for Mussolini.

Have you seen JoJo Rabbit yet?

No.

Is it good?

Is it as good as it looks?

It's great.

Oh, I can't wait.

I can't wait to see it.

Do I need to see it in theater?

It doesn't seem like one I have to see in theater.

No, I mean, you know, it's always fun to laugh with a big group of people, although by

now it's probably thinned out.

Yeah.

And I was laughing a lot and people weren't laughing.

Oh, I like that.

Kind of one of those deals.

Yeah.

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 that.

I didn't know.

I had no idea.

Hitler's on the poster.

I know.

But I didn't know he was an imaginary friend.

Oh, get out of my brain.

Sorry.

I didn't spoil anything.

Okay.

Don't tell me anything else.

That's not some big reveal.

So they go to Switzerland.

All apologies.

I'm sorry.

It's really not a big deal.

It's not a big spoiler.

No, no, no.

Of course not.

Okay.

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.

Belgium's nice.

Sure.

In May of 1940, though, the Nazis invaded Belgium and so they moved to the Netherlands

in 1941.

Where the Nazis already were.

Yeah.

I guess they were.

They can't occupy it again.

Well, in its home.

Right.

And they settled in barn, which is about 23 miles southeast of Amsterdam.

I don't know if that's how you're supposed to say it.

B-A-A-A-R-N.

Right.

I like it.

Probably barren.

Oh, yeah.

But Jesus nailed it.

I think so.

But Dutch is very strange language, but not strange, but just for my English dumb English

ears.

Supposedly English is the strangest of all.

Yeah.

I'm sure.

It's just a hybrid, mongrel 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

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 it was a very odd hybrid.

It sounded like of several different things.

It's all old Celtic stuff.

Yeah.

It's bigger than usual.

Gallic, Gallic.

Yeah.

I think it's Gallic.

It's a language group.

One of the two.

Yeah.

Everything I know about Welsh, I've learned from super furry animals.

Oh, yeah.

Because that guy's Welsh.

Man.

I saw them blow granddaddy off the stage one time.

Oh, you saw them live?

Mm-hmm.

Oh, I think you told me that.

I melted my brain.

Yeah, I'm so good.

I'll bet.

So they're traveling around still, even though they're settled in Bairn, and they go

back to Al Hambra in Spain, which I don't think we said what that is.

No, it's a 13th century Moorish castle from when the Moor's conquered Spain.

It's beautiful.

It is very beautiful.

They built it in the Moorish style and then it was eventually taken over by the Christian

like royalty 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 Islamic patterns you've ever seen in your life.

And they got to Esher.

He'd seen him before, but it was, I guess he was like, oh, that's kind of cool.

Right.

But the second trip that he went back with after they moved to from Switzerland, I think,

to Belgium or maybe to Switzerland, that's when he was like, I am obsessed with these

now.

These testulations started drawing them, jetted it to, it says that they worked together.

So I didn't know that she was an artist, I didn't either.

But they World War II comes back around, when that comes back around, it never left.

Let's be honest.

But Spain would devolve into civil war and so this meant that he was kind of stuck outside

of Amsterdam for a little while longer.

Yeah.

He wasn't doing as much traveling.

No, he was in the Netherlands and he rekindled his friendship with Mesquita, his old mentor

who had stayed in Netherlands this whole time.

And Mesquita was Jewish and he was taken away by the Nazis eventually.

He was killed at Auschwitz, I believe, with his wife.

And their son was also killed at another concentration camp by the Nazis.

And this really got to Escher.

Like this is one of his dear friends and he had a work, a sketch of Mesquitas.

When he went to his house to visit Mesquita, he found the door was open and they weren't

there and they clearly had been taken by the Nazis.

And one of the pieces of artwork that he gathered together to preserve was a sketch of Mesquitas

that had a Nazi boot print on it.

And that's what you were referenced earlier with your Google search.

Mesquita boot print.

Did you, 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 Mesquitas that

was, that had a boot, a board of boot print.

And the Escher hung onto this his entire life.

That was very important to him.

And he was not a very flowery like, like passionate man or anything like that.

I get the impression that he, and this is Escher I'm talking about, that he internalized

a lot of stuff.

And I think that him holding on to that piece of art was probably a more significant

than even it appears on the outside.

Yeah.

And supposedly 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.

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.

Oh, oh, gotcha, gotcha.

Gotcha.

He didn't hide them from you.

Right, right.

Don't tell a Jewish family that you're hiding over here.

No, that would have been weird.

So maybe we should take a break now.

Oh, I think it's unraveled.

Sort of a good, the good guys are.

Yeah.

All right.

And I think I should love and shock.

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Here's something you might not know.

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Okay, Chuck, so World War II kind of comes and goes around Escher despite his best efforts

to escape it.

And it definitely had a mark on him, but one of the other things that had a really big

mark on him was having to move from Italy.

As like you said, like he was married, had a family, his father was still supporting him

and every spring and summer, he would just tour the Italian countryside and visit small

quaint towns and just be inspired to keep making these Italian landscapes.

But Ed makes a really great point here that his Italian landscapes are very handsome works

of art.

Very beautiful.

My favorite.

They're Chuck's favorite.

But you had almost certainly have never seen them in your entire life.

Were it not for him moving from Italy because in doing so, he lost his source of inspiration

and 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.

So he had to kind of turn inward into his own imagination and start coming up with new

subjects.

And in doing that, the true Escher was unlocked.

Yeah, because early in, like a lot of artists early in their career, they kind of free-ranged

through different styles, trying to find their own personal thing.

He had a very colorful clown period.

It's very bizarre, doesn't fit with the rest of it.

Very John Wayne Gacy.

Right.

But you can very clearly see if you look at Mesquita's work, the connection and the influence

from him.

Although Mesquita 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.

They were just kind of like almost after thoughts.

But early on, he did start experimenting with stuff that would later become sort of his

hallmark when he did do like a 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 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, 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 uneasy feeling.

It didn't look like just some beautiful, 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.

Yeah.

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, it was because he wanted it to look that way

and to make it stark and kind of unsettling like that.

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.

Did you see the mummified priests?

Yeah.

That was creepy.

And then one of his...

But isn't it more creepy to actually do that in real life to mummified priests?

Yeah, it's standing up like that in these little alcoves?

Yeah, absolutely.

Sure.

He was just...

Don't kill the messenger.

And he would have sometimes skulls featured in some of his work and stuff like that.

Like the one of the eye, bleep-called eye, right in the middle of the pupil is a skull

staring back.

Yeah.

So he had little touches like that without going full like, you know, love crafty and...

Right.

Or goi or something like that.

And I don't even know if it's Bosch.

I don't know who that is.

Sure you do.

I'm just kidding.

Okay.

I know those people.

Well, 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 MC Escher print and you thought, man, that guy

could sure draw a print.

Imagine cutting that out of wood.

Yeah.

In reverse.

In reverse.

Because that's what he did.

A lot of his stuff were woodcuts.

Even harder than that, Chuck, is the lithograph.

Yeah.

Woodcut, if you've ever made, used a stamp or made a potato stamp as a kid.

You're basically MC Escher.

Well, that's what it is.

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 the stuff.

Right.

Much less cut it out of wood.

Right.

So just take a step back and think about the Escher's that you've seen before.

Well, they were originally carved out of wood.

And now, imagine that to get even more detail because you can't adjust how much ink a certain

part of the woodblock gets.

It's all going to get an even layer of ink.

So to shade something, you have to do cross hatching, lines, stippling, something like

that.

But to get really detailed with shading, you need multiple blocks of the same image in

the 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 woodcuts this guy was doing.

Yeah.

That's sort of like a t-shirt hippie screen printing like a four color shirt.

You got to put it on exactly 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 woodcuts, especially as earlier woodcuts, you can tell they are woodcuts, they look

like woodcuts.

Some of them do not.

There's some of the Italian countryside that just are just astounding and when you stop

and think about the idea that they're, it's not a drawing that their woodcuts, multiple

blocked woodcuts is pretty astounding.

But like I was saying to me, even more difficult is making the lithograph.

Yeah.

I think I talked about this on some other episode.

I know I talked about fatiguing, but I also talked to in industrial arts, we did offset

lithography.

In that social experiment high school, yeah, exactly.

We did offset lithography, which basically, I mean, that's the process today.

I mean, that's how they make newspapers, posters, books, maps kind of everything.

This is with offset lithography.

It was in, do you remember?

It was in the Etch's sketch episode.

Oh.

That's what Ohio art originally did was lithography.

Okay.

Oh man, that's a deep cut.

This is pre, like today, you use aluminum or some other kind of metal sheet and these

emulsions and chemicals.

Back then, it was drawn onto limestone, a flat slab of limestone with a grease pencil and

then use a chemical treatment on the areas that basically water and ink 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 ink, or is it the other

way around?

No, I think they don't hold the ink.

Yeah.

Again, what you're doing is creating a negative image, just like the woodcut, essentially.

Right.

So you've got this 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 that are kind of like a hallmark of some of Escher's more well-known works.

The hands drawing hands, right?

Yeah.

That was a lithograph.

He made that with limestone and grease pen and ink and 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 on the paper.

You have a very special brain if you can work this stuff out as an artist.

Yes.

You know, it's 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 think in negatives

like that.

Like a mathematician, basically.

Your brain has to be set up that way.

Yeah, absolutely.

Lethography is difficult, very labor intensive.

So later on, he would hire a lithographer to actually create his prints after he's sketched

and drawn this stuff out.

Smart man.

And he would destroy the limestone.

Well, he wouldn't destroy it.

He would scrape it clean so we could reuse it.

Right.

So that's the reason, like if you want to buy an original MC Escher, good luck.

Well, there's something such as this.

There's original prints that he made.

Right.

And apparently you're not going to get your hands on one of those limestones.

No, but there are a couple of those left over, but he said that he wanted them.

I think canceled is what they call it in his will, where they intentionally damage it.

So that even if you got a hold of one of these things and you were like, I'm going to print

me a brand new Escher, there'd be like the negative image of snaggle posts like comes

through and like the hand drawing hands picture.

And he did not do many original prints from those original woodcuts and lithographs either

thinking only did 10 of still life with spherical mirror.

And so anything, obviously anything you buy in a Spencer Gifts is going to be a print

anyway.

What?

They told me it was an original you mean bikini lady on Corvette?

You probably get the original that you probably cut the original negative bikini lady on

Corvette.

Oh, man.

Remember that?

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.

Just amazing.

I mean, I did it to make a monkey's t-shirt.

I forgot you used a screen print too.

So did I.

Yeah.

Well, actually, the monkey's t-shirt was screen printing.

I think Kimmerwood, 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, were you ever employed gainfully as a screen artist?

Oh, no.

Oh, no.

Did you do that?

Yeah.

No, I mean, I would have loved to it.

I wasn't good enough.

It's, I was not hard.

Yeah, but I mean, you would draw the stuff or you would just…

No, no, no, no.

I would like, burn the screens and everything and drag the ink through and you did that for

a job.

Sure.

Well, like high school?

No, this is college.

This is college.

What kind of dough do you make doing that?

Jack.

Yeah.

But it's fun.

It's cool work, you know.

You just listen to music and beer and a few bucks.

Pretty much.

Hang out with some cool dudes and, you know, that's great.

Yeah, I got you.

Yeah.

It's a good, good early college job, you know what I mean?

I think it'd be cool.

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, the patchmaker, Katie Kulp, works, or at least

she used to.

I think she's got her own space now.

Oh, cool.

Yeah.

There's a lot of space with T-shirt dudes and any time I'm in there, it's just a good vibe,

you know what I mean?

It really is.

There are a lot worse places to spend your time than a T-shirt shop.

So another thing we should point out is that he did do color occasionally, but color was

a whole different.

You had to do a separate stone for each color.

Right.

So that's why a lot of his stuff ended up in black and white.

Right.

Aside from the fact that he liked it as well.

Yeah, he seemed to be very pleased with black and white in general.

Yeah.

And he was lazy.

No.

But let's take a step back here for a second and examine the idea that you thought MC Escher

was a pretty amazing artist when you just imagined that he was sitting in his studio drawing

all this stuff with a pencil.

Yeah.

Now, really, let it sink in that he carved these things in reverse out of wood or limestone

or limestone.

Yeah.

And then use these crazy techniques to make these extraordinarily detailed, incredibly

precise and technical works of art.

It's amazing.

It really is amazing.

Truly astounding.

And like you said, there are a few of those stones and wood blocks that are owned by

the MC Escher foundation.

Snaggle puts on every single one of them.

And apparently 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

and looking at that limestone and then looking 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.

Have they?

Yeah.

It seems like he's being more appreciated as a truly great artist and less college dorm

wall material.

Yeah.

In 2011, the record for highest overall attendance in the world out of all the museums

in the world that year was at the Centro Cultural Banco de Brazil, which held their magical

world of Escher exhibit.

Oh, wow.

And 70,000 visitors, about 10,000 a day.

Holy cow.

Yep.

So if you think lithography and woodcutting sounds difficult, we'll talk a minute about

mesotint.

That is sort of like woodcutting, except you're using a sheet of copper that starts out as

a rough surface and then you use these little tools to smooth out things that are going

to be the image, applying that ink and then wiping it off.

Right.

Places you smooth out are-

Don't have ink.

The ones that are going to be white on the paper are blanked on the paper, right?

It's the rough edges that hold the ink.

So you cover the whole thing with ink, wipe it down.

The smooth parts come clean.

The rough stuff has the ink and you can use this like, this isn't like, oh look, I made

an X.

Right.

Incredibly fine stippling is possible with these copper plates and all this and a mesotint.

And the eye that you were talking about, the one with the skull.

If you go back and look at that, that was a mesotint.

Yeah, so it was dew drop.

Yep.

Very detailed, cupped leaf showing a single drop of dew inside it with all kinds of

cool reflections.

But Esther called this the black art.

He only made eight of these because it is a real undertaking.

And I think he just, he did a handful of them and then moved on to the far easier woodcutting.

Right.

Right.

He's like, oh, I came back, baby.

All right, we'll take a break and then we'll come back and pick up with his life story

again, which is, I believe we left off in what, into World War II?

Sounds right.

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Okay, World War II is over.

MC Escher was like a lot of people very rattled by that experience in Europe.

And at this point, he still is not a super famous artist making tons of money.

No, but he's more famous than this makes him out to be like, yeah, he's got some renowned

in the Netherlands.

Certain circle debates, yeah.

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 60s.

Yeah, college dorms have not yet started putting his stuff everywhere.

No, but the people who most appreciate what he's doing are scientists and mathematicians

who are like, this is astounding.

This guy is taking what we write out as formulas and turning them into art and making them

precise.

Yeah.

Like you could describe this work of art as a formula.

That is what MC Escher was able to do.

He was able to take math and translate it into a visual art.

Yeah.

And remember what you said earlier, this is where we are in his life where he is not in the

Italian countryside.

He's been ripped from its bodice.

So his muse is gone and he is now looking inward for his inspiration in his own unique

brain.

He's being forced into his own bodice, face first.

This is where he starts with these tessellations, more elaborate geometric shapes.

He's doing the lizards and the birds and the insects, his tessellations, really, really

cool stuff.

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.

And he does so.

And that taught him a lot.

And then he learned about the 17 wallpaper groups, which is so dense that I, you know,

how much do we even want to talk about it?

Well, we'll just sum it up.

The 17 wallpaper groups, basically, is a mathematical concept that says every geometric

pattern, two-dimensional geometric pattern, falls into one of 17 categories.

There's only 17.

And they're called kind of half jokingly the wallpaper groups, because wallpaper has

geometric patterns on it, usually, right?

As you couldn't understand it mathematically, it was proved out twice independently, that

there are 17 wallpaper groups.

Yeah, 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 17 geometric wallpaper patterns.

Within its walls.

That's pretty cool.

Yeah.

So, of course, this would appeal to Esher.

But he didn't understand.

He couldn't sit down and explain, like, we can't, what the 17 wallpaper groups are,

or what they mean mathematically, but he understood them intuitively.

And as he became friends with mathematicians about mid-career, he was apparently kind of

amused to find, like, you know, these guys spend all this time writing this stuff out

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 bad.

I'm just kidding.

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, and

that, like, I'm drawing this stuff for my creative brain.

On limestone.

Yeah.

On limestone.

Cutting it out of wood.

So I think he appreciated the way they coalesced.

But he was very, like you said, most of his friends were mathematicians, I think, later

in life.

Who did he, who he printed?

The pen roses?

Yeah, Roger and Lionel Pinrose, which I love how it's described here, Father and Son

mathematician team.

Yeah.

Yeah.

You know those.

They were matching dolphin shorts.

Oh, man.

Father uniform.

I wish people still were those.

Yeah.

Did you ever wear those?

No.

They were a little before my time.

Wow.

They were for joggers and runners.

Yeah.

And it starts dangerous.

2011.

And who do I forgot about that?

Yeah.

That is what Hooter's wages were.

The warrants dolphin shorts with the bronze banny hose.

Yeah.

White socks.

Yeah.

It was a very high top.

It was bizarre.

It was an interesting look.

Somebody put that together.

And not a woman.

Do you remember there was a, there was a Hooter's airline?

What?

Yeah.

Wow.

That kind of rings a bell.

Yeah.

That was very 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?

I get all that they did serve chicken wings on those.

Of course.

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.

You know, if I sit next to somebody on the plane and I'm going to eat, I ask them if it's

okay if I eat first.

Like if you bring food on.

Yeah.

I don't bring food on to a flight.

Sometimes dude, you just have to.

Yeah.

It's a long flight and they run out of turkey wraps like in the first half a second.

So you just pull out your what?

My kung pao.

Not even your pocket.

You had just in case they're out of turkey wraps.

Not even in a container, just in my pocket.

Oh goodness.

So I thought this part was sort of amusing 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

chaos, parentheses, wherein he went and dug up a bunch of trash and said I will draw

chaos.

And it ended up being, if you go and look at it, there's like a broken bottle, a broken

egg shell, an open sardine tin, a broken clay pipe and some other reviews drawn to like

perfect or I guess woodcutter lithographed with perfect beautiful precision.

Right.

That was chaos.

Yeah.

His interpretation of it.

He just couldn't do it.

He was very much preoccupied with chaos.

He has a very famous quote, probably his most famous quote, 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 very much into geometry and precision and clean lines and all that.

Yeah.

And also his career would progress these repeating patterns on a finite space.

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 pattern all around

and it as it gets closer and closer to the edge, they get smaller and smaller and smaller.

Right.

And you can just sort of imagine that there is no end to these shapes.

But they're just going infinitely around the sphere.

Yeah.

Perfectly.

But again, you have to stop and remind yourself, this is a two-dimensional image I'm looking

at.

Right.

And then secondly, this is cut out of wood.

But yeah, he apparently made a three-dimensional wood carving of his circle limit series later

on in life.

And I'll bet that's spectacular to see too.

He made it what?

A three-dimensional wood carving of it, basically proving that his two-dimensional drawing was

accurate because he made it in the three dimensions.

That's awesome.

Yeah.

He was just showing off toward the end there.

I like reptiles.

Yeah.

That's a good one.

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.

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 too.

And that actually kind of jives with another quote he had that I think really sums that

style of art up.

He said, the flat shape irritates me.

I feel as if I were shouting to my figures, you are too fictitious for me.

You're just lie there, static and frozen together, do something.

Come out of there and show me what you're capable of.

And he would shout it just like that.

And then Jetta would back out of the room slowly.

Okay, dear.

He's your tea.

Yeah.

And that sort of brings us to with the reptiles.

We need to talk a little bit about illusion, 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.

That's a neat one.

Yeah, it's really cool.

I like that one too.

Or relativity, which, I don't know, I mean, is there a most famous, maybe, hands?

It's between hands, self-portrait with fear and relativity.

Yeah, relativity is the one with the staircases.

Yeah, and people going up and down stairs 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.

After the famous father and son, mathematician gene.

And speaking of the penrose is the, I just say, mathematician.

I just invented something.

I did.

I did?

That's amazing, completely by accident.

The penrose is, that would be great, mathematician.

Yeah.

I bet that's something.

Right.

But the penrose is apparently wrote, they saw some of Escher's work, wrote a paper explaining

his work about impossible things like impossible stairs, which came to be called penrose stairs.

And Escher was either mailed a copy of this or somebody pointed it out to him.

So he created something called house of stairs, or upstairs downstairs, one of the two.

And sent one of the original prints to the pen roses.

So in a way, their correspondence and inspiration for one another was like a set of impossible

stairs in real life.

Oh.

That interesting.

Yeah.

And this is, you know, we were talking earlier about how his work somehow felt unsettling.

And you know, the subject matter as well, when you think about these, the subjects walking

in relativity, clearly never getting anywhere.

Getting downstairs, sideways, all of a sudden, I'm walking back into the same staircase.

I was just on.

Right.

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, the one that you're just talking about upstairs downstairs,

they, that was supposedly based on some, a staircase in his school.

Oh, really?

Which suddenly says quite a bit about his psychology, don't you think?

Well, how so?

Well, I mean, like these students aren't going anywhere.

They're not even human.

They're centipedes with human faces.

Gotcha.

Gotcha.

And they're kind of trapped in this.

Well, you could definitely call like a, a, a, a purposeless existence in this building.

It was 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 want to Belgium in 1950 that led to an article in the studio, which was a 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.

Yeah, yeah.

Then that led to a larger exhibition at the International Mathematical Congress in

1954, flash forward to 66.

He was featured in Mathematical Games Column in Scientific American by Martin Gardner.

Math Magician.

I guarantee you that's a thing.

And that increased his, and this was 66.

So it was kind of the perfect timing with the hippies and the drugs and the counter culture.

Right.

And I guess who was it, Graham Nash?

Graham Nash.

Rick Jagger sent him a fan letter and made the mistake of calling him by his first name.

Oh, really?

Shesher did not appreciate.

Stanley Kubrick tried to recruit him to make 2001 a space Odyssey, a fourth dimensional

film.

Yeah, there's this interesting article called The Impossible World of MC Escher that Stephen

Pull wrote in The Guardian that has a lot of that stuff in it.

But he was kind of like, no, I'm good over here with the 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 all over.

He was huge.

Yeah.

Dorm room huge.

Uh, 448 works.

Yeah.

Then this doesn't count all the sketches and drafts.

These are like the actual final works.

Right.

And like we said earlier, he died in 1972 of Cancer, the age of 73.

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.

Yeah.

I don't know.

Like he was born in 1899.

Well, great grandkids maybe.

Yeah.

Okay.

I guess if his kids were born in the 1920s, yeah, contemporaries of our parents, maybe.

Sure.

The oldsters.

Yeah.

Boomers.

Hey, boomer.

Okay.

Hey, boomer.

So you get that right in that, that journey to infinity movie, apparently all three of

his children appear in it.

Oh, really?

So 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 he?

He looked a little bit like him.

Yeah.

It's not expecting that.

Nope.

So there's MC Escher.

That's right.

Speaking of not expecting that, uh, bikini babe on Corvette, sure.

And Hooter's airline made appearances in the MC Escher.

I just want to point out.

If you want 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, I've been listening to your show since 2011, I've even seen you, I've even

seen you on your first amazing show in Chicago and had to wait a whole year to hear that on

the podcast.

Oh, yeah.

That's how it works.

Sure.

It's not even guaranteed that it's going to be this show you saw.

Yeah, a lot of podcasts put out just tons and tons of live shows.

We don't do that.

No.

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 they make for the best, just regular content.

I think most people think that.

But we did so.

That's why we only put out the one.

Right.

So back to the letter.

It was so great.

I would even save high interest episodes for my son to listen to over the years.

You were one of the few people that can keep his attention.

And I never thought I would write.

But as a science teacher, you said something recently that is 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.

Really good tip, guys.

Thanks for sharing that.

Thanks for all your work.

And now I will have to figure out what to do now that I am finally caught up.

Keep up the great work, and that is from Ginny with an eye.

Thanks, Ginny with an eye.

Hopefully you dot the eye with the heart, maybe with a little reflection on the side of

the heart.

You remember that one?

Two curved lines.

Top with a top and 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.

Oh, sure.

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

It almost looks like a bent Roman numeral tube inside the heart.

That's the reflection of light.

That's where the light's coming from.

It's beautiful.

Thank you.

That's your reference.

I'm treasured that.

But you're welcome, Chuck.

I wasn't going to 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 on to cephichanota.com and look for our

social links there.

And you can also send us an email like Ginny with an eye did.

You can send it to stuffpodcasts at iHeartRadio.com.

Stuff you should know is a production of iHeartRadio.

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