influential artist M.C. Escher Artists #3

1.            The artist’s background (personal, artistic, and social contexts)

Maurits Cornelis Escher (1898-1972)

2.            The big idea and key concepts (what is the work about?)

His work was had a lot of math and experimenting with visual play to trick the viewers. But he also made some really beautiful more realistic work as well.

3.            Boundaries (Media, subject matter, visual form, techniques)

M.C. Escher, during his lifetime, made 448 lithographs, woodcuts and wood engravings and over 2000 drawings and sketches.

4.            The key artwork(s) (include title, year, medium, and insert links if needed)

He is most famous for his so-called impossible structures, such as Ascending and Descending, Relativity, his Transformation Prints, such as Metamorphosis I, Metamorphosis II and Metamorphosis III, Sky & Water I or Reptiles.

5.            The artist’s artmaking practices

•                    Knowledge (how does the artist acquire knowledge?)

He acquires knowledge by experimenting with abstraction and he had the knowledge to be able to make pictures transform and seem explicable at first sight and yet again so surreal.

•                    Artmaking problem (how to investigate and express the idea?) 
o Technical strategies (i.e., limit color choices or only use secondary colors)
o Conceptual strategies (i.e., play as a conceptual strategy for experimenting, pretending, 
and risk taking)

Escher uses a lot of strategies my limiting color to gray scale, black, and white. The conceptual strategies of his work is shown through playfulness and curiosity.