Day and Night 1938

M.C. Escher made this print, Day and Night, by using a woodcut. Can you imagine the act of carving each mark out of the wood, carefully working to create a mirror image in the final print? Look at how the landscape transforms from day to night as your eye travels across the image. The fields morph into birds, which alternate from black to white. It makes me wonder what Escher might have been thinking about when he made this. Was he thinking of the shifting nature of perception, where one thing can become another depending on how you look at it? I love how Escher plays with patterns and tessellations, creating a visual puzzle that keeps your eye moving. His work has this mathematical precision, but also a playful quality that reminds me of the surrealists. Artists are always in conversation with one another, across time and space, building on each other’s ideas. It makes you wonder what Escher might have thought of digital art and the way artists use code to create repeating patterns.