By Haasini Vasudevan
After looking at the edges and top of the paper you get a sense of which direction the paper is facing. When you look at the picture, you are using clues from your experience. Artists usually create pictures by using their knowledge of gravity and sunlight above shadows.
Conveniently artists’ common knowledge gives them an advantage over space and time. Shading and highlighting for shapes and figures suggest orientation. The size and position of figures give viewers a sense of distance.
M.C. Escher, a graphic artist, made visual diagrams to confuse viewers. Putting optical illusions in his diagrams, he messed with our minds. Recognizingly, a well known quote of his is, ”It is… great fun to deliberately confuse two and three dimensions… or to poke fun at gravity. Are you sure that a floor cannot also be a ceiling? Are you absolutely sure that you go up when you walk up a staircase?”
Escher’s puzzling work of 1953 was named Relativity. Deceivingly it was always very hard to tell which way to view the scene. The Relativity had three worlds intersecting in each other. Appearing to be moving figures would sit in chairs, climb down staircases and even walk through doorways. No matter which way you turned the scene, some of the figures seemed to defy gravity. Although some of the figures defied gravity, the figures in their own worlds obeyed the laws of gravity.
To convincingly depict such mind-boggling scenes, Escher used forms of nature and mathematics. Escher was an astute student of life and had a sharp eye to wonders of the world but he was weak in school. Meaningfully, “exploring with lines” and “thinking in images” were two of his famous quotes.
Complicated geometrical patterns fascinated Escher. In his early years, Escher loved to sketch detailed drawings of real places and structures. But in his late 30’s his thoughts changed and he began to draw scenes from his imagination. While he also began to explore mathematical relationships with figures and shapes, he gained access to different laws of mathematics and nature. Early mathematicians admired his work and gave him inspiration for his beautiful art.
Escher created a large body of scenes that gave a rich inspiration to mathematicians and artists in his seventy-three years. But still, this showed only a fraction of his genius. Wisely Escher once stated, “What I give form to in daylight is only one percent of what I see in darkness.”