San Cosimo 1932

M.C. Escher made this print, San Cosimo, using black ink on paper. I just love how Escher takes this vertiginous landscape and renders it in such high contrast. You can see how the artist carefully considered light and shadow, playing with the architecture nestled into the landscape. I can imagine Escher working away at the block, carving out all these tiny white lines to create this dizzying sense of depth. What a feat of labor! The way he uses lines to suggest the clouds, the rock formations, the terraced hills... it’s like he’s building a whole world out of marks. It reminds me a little of Piranesi’s architectural prints. Artists are always in conversation, you know? Echoing, responding, challenging one another across time and space. Each mark, each decision, is an expression of thought.