Wood near Menton 1921

M.C. Escher made this woodcut, Wood near Menton, with ink on paper. Look at the way he’s carved into the wood to create these crisp black lines, a real testament to the physical effort of artmaking. There’s a tension in this piece, right? A play between chaos and control. The lower half is ordered, almost architectural, but the trees and branches, my god they are a tangled mess. They remind me of a plate of spaghetti, or maybe the inside of my brain. Look at how each mark is so deliberate, so carefully placed, yet the overall effect is a kind of wildness. You can really imagine him in the South of France, amongst the trees, carving away to capture this moment in time. You know, it reminds me a bit of some of Ernst Haeckel’s drawings of microscopic organisms. That same level of detail and precision, but with a kind of hallucinatory twist. Art as an exchange, it’s always an ongoing conversation.