The 3rd Day of the Creation 1926

This is M.C. Escher's vision of the third day of creation, captured in black and white. He's conjuring a landscape that's teeming with life, and yet somehow orderly. I imagine Escher, the master of visual paradox, carving into the block with precision. Look at those horizontal lines creating a kind of optical, atmospheric perspective. You get a sense of water and sky that's so simple. Then, your eye travels down and there's this sudden burst of detail. Plants, trees, and mushrooms jostle for space, each rendered with such care. It's almost like the primordial soup turned into solid matter. He's in conversation with the natural world, but also playing with perception. Escher's work has a mathematical and logical structure. The organic world, full of messy and beautiful profusion, is presented as the orderly development of a single idea. What he does, and what artists do in general, is find new ways of seeing, thinking, and experiencing the world.