Scholastica Illustration 1931

M.C. Escher made this "Scholastica Illustration" with a wood engraving technique, so the images are built up from careful and precise line-making. It’s not like the free and intuitive gestures you get with a paintbrush. More like slowly building up an image through a labor-intensive process. What I find so remarkable about this piece is the way Escher uses these lines to create a sense of depth and atmosphere. Look at the upper left part, see that creepy mask and the lines of the walls, ceiling and shelves that seem to converge at a vanishing point somewhere beyond the picture plane. These lines give you the feeling you are looking into a real space, even though it's just an illusion created with ink and paper. Escher wasn’t necessarily trying to trick us. Instead, he was exploring how we perceive and interpret the world around us, and how art can create new ways of seeing and experiencing reality. It’s a process not unlike what Picasso was doing in painting around the same time, exploring multiple perspectives in a single image. It's not always about what we see, but how we see.