Plane Filling Motif with Reptiles 1941

Here's a black and white print of reptiles by M.C. Escher. It's a trip, right? The reptiles loop into each other, in that Escher kind of way, where the figure becomes the ground. I can just imagine him thinking about how to build a world out of these little lizards, multiplying and covering the page. It must have been a precise and mathematical process, but also intuitive. You can feel him working out how to flip and turn the images of the lizards, one following the other. It makes me think about the relationship between figure and ground, and how artists like Escher and Albers were preoccupied with how our eyes and brains perceive space, how we organize shapes into something that makes sense. Even though it’s a print, you can feel the texture through its precise lines. It reminds me of how artists are constantly riffing off each other across time, turning and evolving ideas as they go.