Landscape 1920

M.C. Escher made this landscape drawing with pen and ink, and you can almost hear the scratching of the pen across the page, right? I imagine Escher standing right there in the landscape, squinting to see the distance, lost in all the details of the foliage. He's so committed to the line, to the painstaking work of describing the forms and textures. I can relate to that. I often work in ink, trying to find the essence of an image with a series of marks. But I also wonder, what was Escher thinking about as he made this work? This isn’t one of his impossible spaces. I can feel his hand moving across the paper, building up the image. And I'm reminded that we all learn from each other, influencing each other across time. There's something really lovely about that ongoing conversation, right?