Knots Colour 1965

M.C. Escher made this print, Knots Colour, and right away what grabs me is the pure graphic intensity and the obsessive detail. You can tell he just loved puzzling things out, line by line. It's about a process, and the eye is drawn to the making-of as much as the image. The color palette is pretty restrained, mostly browns and tans, but that just makes the geometry pop even more. Look at the way he uses these tiny parallel lines to create the illusion of depth and volume, the gears in the lower portion are a kind of feat of engineering as much as art. Escher reminds me a little of Sol LeWitt, who also had this thing for systematic, almost architectural drawings. Both artists are kind of like scientist-artists, charting a very particular, very idiosyncratic course. But with Escher, there's always this playful sense of wonder, like he's inviting you into his own private mathematical playground.