Spider in the Garden (design for a ceramic plate) 1920

M.C. Escher made this design for a ceramic plate, called 'Spider in the Garden,' on paper using watercolor and ink. The colours are simple, garden colours; green, brown, blue. The web is almost diagrammatic, but what I love about Escher is how the diagram becomes an expressive thing, a place for the eye to wander. He's so clever, the way he teases out a flat plane into something deeper, something we can fall into. Look at how the spider is spotlit with that little halo of yellow, sitting like a jewel in the center of the web. The precision of the web is offset by the loose painterly rendering of the leaves, each outlined with a gentle stroke of the brush, all of this contained by the outer ring in blue. Escher always reminds me of another plate painter, Giorgio Morandi, both concerned with light and space, albeit in very different ways. Like a plate, art is a surface that contains an entire world.