Home » Visual & Performing Arts » Illustration/Illumination » If It Moved Him, He Had To Draw It

If It Moved Him, He Had To Draw It

© Suzanne Hill

Introduction

I have been holiday shopping. Last night I was in a bookstore, marveling at the array of wall calendars: landscapes, animals, angels, artists. The one featuring M.C. Escher’s compelling work caught my eye. Further on, shelved with the books of crafts, was a book with brightly-colored paper cutout and foldup “kaleidocycles” of Escher’s designs. In the children’s section, his drawings have been transcribed into coloring books. After reading about his life and ideas, I believe Escher would find it difficult to imagine that today his drawings are decorating calendars, paper kaleidoscopes, T-shirts, and stickers!

The Haarlem Period

Maurits Cornelis (M.C.) Escher was born in the Netherlands in 1898, the youngest of three boys. Escher’s parents were wealthy, and while he was a child the family traveled frequently. He was lucky that his parents supported him in his artistic endeavors. It would be thirty years before he earned any income from his artwork.

Escher wasn’t particularly successful at school; in fact he never graduated from high school. His father was adamant he study architecture, which he began at the School for Architecture and Decorative Arts in Haarlem. But a favorite teacher influenced him to pursue his true love – graphic arts.

His background in architecture seems to have had a lifelong influence on his work, as evidenced by his fascination with building construction and architectural details. While in school at Haarlem, Escher experimented with themes that would suffuse his later works: perspective, architecture, illusion, perception, and distortion. The woodcuts he did for a humorous booklet Easter Flowers exhibit several of these themes: mirror images, crystals and polyhedral shapes, spheres, pools of water, and the ripples and distortions they cause. I came across a story describing him lying on the stone floor of a church, arms spread wide, studying his reflection and the building around him distorted in the round shiny candelabra above him. He enjoyed working on his projects, both his own and his school projects, saying that there were “so many ideas floating around in his head.” This period of his work became known as his “Haarlem period.”

Interestingly, while Escher dealt with themes of distortion and illusion, he always preferred his work to represent reality, and he drew from actual observation. He felt that everything fascinating in the world around us is defined in realism: shapes, symbols, textures, and details are what make objects meaningful. Abstract figures had little meaning for viewers.