![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
On MC Escher in Edinburgh
Jul. 13th, 2015 05:07 pmI went to the MC Escher exhibition at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art with MLW and the Captain and a friend of mine.
We really enjoyed it. The Captain had a treasure hunt to find lots of different animals in the pictures which kept him entertained and engaged with the pictures long enough for him to start enjoying them. They were "odd" and "really freaking him out" and "very, very cool". He liked seeing the Escher picture which I have a t-shirt of.
I like the combination of surrealism and real technical mastery and attention to fine detail. One of the best things in the exhibit was seeing the early drafts and working sketches for the finished pieces. One in particular sticks in my memory. Preliminaries for the picture of a mediterranian town with a magnified sphere in the middle showing first the actual townscape, then a the area to be distorted and finally the actual finished piece itself. As MLW said, like Les Dawson playing piano, you need to be really good at seeing the world and drawing it in order to draw it wrong the way Escher does. Like many people I've started in wonder at the strange rule bending worlds that Escher created. i've spent hours trying to work out which planes various characters are in or what it would be like to live inside the pictures. Along side the pictures, there was a nice level of information about Escher's life and how it influenced his art and some nice piece of paraphenalia showing the craft elements of the art. And a nice story about how he'd turned down a request to do an album cover for the Rolling Stones because he hadn't heard of them
Well worth a visit if you are in Edinburgh between now and the 27th of September.
We really enjoyed it. The Captain had a treasure hunt to find lots of different animals in the pictures which kept him entertained and engaged with the pictures long enough for him to start enjoying them. They were "odd" and "really freaking him out" and "very, very cool". He liked seeing the Escher picture which I have a t-shirt of.
I like the combination of surrealism and real technical mastery and attention to fine detail. One of the best things in the exhibit was seeing the early drafts and working sketches for the finished pieces. One in particular sticks in my memory. Preliminaries for the picture of a mediterranian town with a magnified sphere in the middle showing first the actual townscape, then a the area to be distorted and finally the actual finished piece itself. As MLW said, like Les Dawson playing piano, you need to be really good at seeing the world and drawing it in order to draw it wrong the way Escher does. Like many people I've started in wonder at the strange rule bending worlds that Escher created. i've spent hours trying to work out which planes various characters are in or what it would be like to live inside the pictures. Along side the pictures, there was a nice level of information about Escher's life and how it influenced his art and some nice piece of paraphenalia showing the craft elements of the art. And a nice story about how he'd turned down a request to do an album cover for the Rolling Stones because he hadn't heard of them
Well worth a visit if you are in Edinburgh between now and the 27th of September.
