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"I never got a pass mark in math ... Just imagine - mathematicians now use my prints to illustrate their books."
~ M. C. Escher
17 June 1898 – 27 March 1972 
was a Dutch graphic artist who made mathematically inspired woodcuts, lithographs, and mezzotints.
~ M. C. Escher
17 June 1898 – 27 March 1972 was a Dutch graphic artist who made mathematically inspired woodcuts, lithographs, and mezzotints.
Moorish tessellations including this one at the Alhambra inspired Escher's work with tilings of the plane. He made sketches of this and other Alhambra patterns in 1936.
"My work is a game, a very serious game." ~ M. C. Escher
Escher's last work, Snakes, 1969
Escher's last work, Snakes, 1969
Forerunner of Escher's curved perspectives, geometries, and reflections: Parmigianino's Self-portrait in a Convex Mirror, 1524
Forerunner of Escher's impossible perspectives: William Hogarth's Satire on False Perspective, 1753
Forerunner of Escher's fantastic endless stairs: Piranesi's Carceri Plate VII – The Drawbridge, 1745, reworked 1761
Hexagonal tessellation with animals: Study of Regular Division of the Plane with Reptiles (1939). Escher reused the design in his 1943 lithograph Reptiles.
Multiple viewpoints and impossible stairs: Relativity, 1953
Perpetual motion machine with Penrose triangles: Waterfall, 1961
"Hands, are the most honest part of the human body, they cannot lie as laughing eyes and the mouth can." ~ M. C. Escher
Drawing Hands, 1948
Drawing Hands, 1948
"Wonder is the salt of the earth." ~ M. C. Escher
Hyperbolic tessellation: Circle Limit III, 1959
Hyperbolic tessellation: Circle Limit III, 1959
Poster advertising the first major exhibition of Escher's work in Britain (Dulwich Picture Gallery, 14 October 2015 – 17 January 2016). The image is based on Hand with Reflecting Sphere, 1935.
"What I give form to in daylight is only one per cent of what I have seen in darkness." ~ M. C. Escher
Wall tableau of one of Escher's bird tessellations at the Princessehof Ceramics Museum in Leeuwarden
Wall tableau of one of Escher's bird tessellations at the Princessehof Ceramics Museum in Leeuwarden
"I can't keep from fooling around with our irrefutable certainties. It is, for example, a pleasure knowingly to mix up two and three dimensionalities, flat and spatial, and to make fun of gravity." ~ M. C. Escher
Sculpture...as in Escher's 1952 work Gravitation (Univ. of Twente)
Sculpture...as in Escher's 1952 work Gravitation (Univ. of Twente)
"I don't use drugs, my dreams are frightening enough."
~ M. C. Escher
~ M. C. Escher
"I try in my prints to testify that we live in a beautiful and orderly world, not in a chaos without norms, even though that is how it sometimes appears."
~ M. C. Escher
~ M. C. Escher
"The laws of the phenomena around us--order, regularity, cyclical repetition, and renewals--have assumed greater and greater importance for me. The awareness of their presence gives me peace and provides me with support."
~ M. C. Escher
~ M. C. Escher
"So let us then try to climb the mountain, not by stepping on what is below us, but to pull us up at what is above us, for my part at the stars; amen."
~ M. C. Escher
~ M. C. Escher
"Simplicity and order are, if not the principal, then certainly the most important guidelines for human beings in general."
~ M. C. Escher
~ M. C. Escher
"I might be in the basement. I'll go upstairs and check."
~ M. C. Escher
~ M. C. Escher
"I am myself: a light. In me you find your fate. So be not blind to the truth shining from my glow."
~ M. C. Escher
~ M. C. Escher
