MC ESCHER

Maurits Cornelius Escher was born on June 17, 1898 in Leeuwarden, Netherlands. His birth parents were Sarah and George Escher, who had five children, Maurits was the youngest. Escher planned to be an architect like his father, but his grades and desire to create art kept him back from it. He attended Haarlem’s School for Architectural and Decorative arts. There he decided to take up his passion of graphic arts under his mentors, Samuel Jessurun de Mesquita, help. Escher traveled to the Mediterranean and was influenced by the Alhambra Palace in Spain. The following year, he met Jetta Umiker and now has three children, which they raised in Rome. During that time he worked mostly on painting and engravings that involved capturing landscapes and buildings as well as self-portraits and pictures of his wife and family. Escher moved his family to Switzerland in 1935 due to the rise of fascism in Italy. However, they later traveled back to Spain where he was once again inspired by the complex buildings and decided to focus his artwork more on tessellations and patterns. He often featured overlapping images that morph into something else. (“Seen in his ‘Metamorosis’ and ‘Development series”). The Escher’s moved yet again, this time to Belgium in the late 1930s but soon moved to Holland due to Nazi invasion. His artwork explored and ‘held concepts of geometry, logic, space and infinity’.
Tessellations are arrangements of closed shapes that completely cover the plane without overlapping and without leaving gaps. The shapes that usually make up a tessellation are polygons or similar regular shapes. An example of a tessellation could be the square and or rectangular tiles that cover a floor. Escher, however, was interested by irregular tessellations as well and took special delight in what he called “metamorphoses, in which the shapes changed and interacted with each other, and sometimes even broke free of the plane itself.”
Escher incorporated mathematics with arts by