Vitorchiano nel Cimino 1925

This is M.C. Escher's wood engraving, Vitorchiano nel Cimino, and right away, the dramatic push and pull of black and white grabs me. I can almost hear the scraping of the burin across the woodblock, carving out these incredibly precise, intricate details. The way Escher builds the scene, it's like he's not just showing us a place, but also how we see. I imagine him out there, squinting, really looking at the world, and then translating that vision into this intense, almost obsessive pattern of lines. And those skies! Those precise and definite lines make me think of the Futurists and their images of speed and movement, and I see how the image relates to the work of other printmakers who have experimented with abstraction. It's like Escher is having a conversation with all these other artists across time, bouncing ideas off each other, pushing the boundaries of what a print can do. It's a reminder that art is never created in a vacuum, it's always part of a bigger, ongoing dialogue.