Speaker 1: Hi, everybody. Chuck here on a Saturday. I'm just sitting
Speaker 1: here drawing cubes and things with my poor artwork. But
Speaker 1: you know who was really good at this? Mc Esher
Speaker 1: And this episode from December twenty nineteen gets all into
Speaker 1: the life of the great artist. And the title is
Speaker 1: mc esher and his Trippy Art. I hope you enjoy it.
Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2: Hey, and welcome to the podcast.
Speaker 3: I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W Chuck Bryant, and
Speaker 3: there's Jerry over there, and this is Stuff you Should Know.
Speaker 2: The Arts Sea.
Speaker 1: Edition is Jerry Roomtone. Roland.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think that's make believe stuff.
Speaker 1: Room tone.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: She might as well be like, let me capture a
Speaker 3: few fairies in this, Mason jow First.
Speaker 2: I think it's the same thing.
Speaker 1: We may need us in the final edit. Perry, I
Speaker 1: don't know what it is about to explain to everyone.
Speaker 1: Room tone is you do this on film sets and
Speaker 1: in studios where you just make everyone sit completely silently
Speaker 1: while you capture the sound of the room. So I
Speaker 1: guess you can. What do you do with that, Joe?
Speaker 1: Do you layer it in in case you need it
Speaker 1: or something. Did you hear that? Everyone?
Speaker 3: She said, she cleans up the background to everybody listening.
Speaker 3: It sounded like.
Speaker 1: There's something about it. Though. It's like being in church
Speaker 1: and getting the giggles. Like it's really hard, especially on
Speaker 1: a film set when there's like fifty people standing around
Speaker 1: being completely silent.
Speaker 3: I suspect it's strictly a power trip, you think, So
Speaker 3: the person calling for a room tone, that's what I think.
Speaker 1: I'm going to start doing that my house when things
Speaker 1: get out of hand room tone?
Speaker 2: Do you think that works?
Speaker 3: Don't make me bust out the room tone on you? Well,
Speaker 3: since this no, no, I was going to say, since
Speaker 3: we're talking about room tone, obviously, the topic today is
Speaker 3: mc escher, who is well known for going berserk anytime
Speaker 3: someone asked him to be quiet for room tone, trash chairs,
Speaker 3: grab reptiles straight out of the two dimensions and throw
Speaker 3: them into the third dimension, just do all sorts of weird.
Speaker 1: Stuff that's funny.
Speaker 2: Did you think so that was a joke just for you?
Speaker 1: Yeah? So he everyone knows mc es or. If you've
Speaker 1: ever been to college or taken drugs.
Speaker 2: Or sold drugs to somebody in college.
Speaker 1: Then you've probably seen hands drawing hands or I mean,
Speaker 1: that's not what the name of that one.
Speaker 2: Was, but it's called drawing hands, oh is it?
Speaker 1: Or the Some of his more famous ones are the
Speaker 1: these impossible rooms like stairs that lead to sideway stairs
Speaker 1: but you got to wrap your head around it in
Speaker 1: a certain way to even make sense of it, all.
Speaker 3: Right, or stairs that lead into other stairs that lead
Speaker 3: back into the other stairs.
Speaker 2: Sure this is constant.
Speaker 1: Or I'm a big fan of that one self portrait
Speaker 1: he did in the with the sphere. Yeah, the mirror sphere,
Speaker 1: mirror sphere.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's cool, it is very cool.
Speaker 3: I'm not crazy about the face, even though I'm sure
Speaker 3: he did it exactly precise, but the hand, if you
Speaker 3: look at the hand, it's really realistic.
Speaker 2: It's very pretty.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean I like this stuff. This is not
Speaker 1: my style, as in anything I would put on my
Speaker 1: walls these days, but I still think he's one of
Speaker 1: the coolest, more innovative artists out there.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: And there's a great factoid that I hope will hold
Speaker 1: till the end, which not the end but kind of
Speaker 1: where it falls in our So what an outline?
Speaker 3: What does factoid mean against I mean you've killed ten
Speaker 3: percent of all the facts, that's right, and this is
Speaker 3: just one of the ten percent remaining.
Speaker 1: That's right.
Speaker 2: Okay, gotcha. So one of the things you chuck about MC.
Speaker 3: I sure that I found was that if you were
Speaker 3: impressed by his work, prepared to get exponentially more impressed
Speaker 3: as we talk about how he made those works. Well too,
Speaker 3: that's the fact of the show too for me. Oh okay,
Speaker 3: that's the factoid you.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you got a hold onto that.
Speaker 3: Oh sure, sure, sure sure. I was just teasing it
Speaker 3: a little bit. I didn't know that's what you're talking about,
Speaker 3: although I should have guessed. Yeah. So this is a
Speaker 3: talking about an artist, which means that we should probably
Speaker 3: talk about the artist being born. And in the case
Speaker 3: of MC Escher, whose name, by the way, was Moritz Cornelis,
Speaker 3: I want to say Cornelius, but there's no U in there.
Speaker 1: I think Cornelis.
Speaker 3: Sure Esher, I nailed the last nurme. That's right, But
Speaker 3: I misspoke on name.
Speaker 1: Oh you didn't say the name nrme.
Speaker 2: So I nailed the last nurme.
Speaker 3: This is the point where the people say, get to
Speaker 3: the point already.
Speaker 1: Well we are at that point. That's MC and then
Speaker 1: Esher born June seventeenth, eighteen ninety eight, not nineteen eighty nine,
Speaker 1: as the Grabster put it. Yeah, it was like, man,
Speaker 1: he's like, here's the numbers. He was born in leu Warden, Netherlands,
Speaker 1: grew up in Arnheim, which is about sixty miles southeast
Speaker 1: of Amsterdam.
Speaker 2: Is that right?
Speaker 1: Yeah? Okay, I mapped all this stuff out nice, kind
Speaker 1: of that general area.
Speaker 2: He went on a little Google tour.
Speaker 1: Sure, and he signed even from early on as MCE
Speaker 1: he signed his paintings, although people called him mock m
Speaker 1: a UK friends and family.
Speaker 3: Right, which didn't mean anything, Ed points out. But it's
Speaker 3: just like, you know, an affectionate term for Moritz. Yeah,
Speaker 3: is it Mouritz?
Speaker 1: Probably Maritz Maurites, cornelis Escher, but.
Speaker 2: It could also go the way of Morris. So is
Speaker 2: it Moritz or more?
Speaker 1: I don't know.
Speaker 2: I wish I knew.
Speaker 1: Well. What we do know is that in this we
Speaker 1: should put a pin in because it sort of plays
Speaker 1: a big part in how he pursued his art. But
Speaker 1: his dad had some money.
Speaker 2: He was a rich kid, yeah for sure.
Speaker 1: Which really helps. As we'll see as he's trapesing around Europe.
Speaker 3: On dad's dime, slowly getting better at art slowly.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's a good point, because he was not great
Speaker 1: in school. He did love drawing class, but apparently wasn't
Speaker 1: you know, he didn't have his second grade teachers falling
Speaker 1: over themselves about what a talented artist he was.
Speaker 3: No, and apparently he also didn't consider himself much of
Speaker 3: an artist, although he engaged in art like he did
Speaker 3: produce art from a very young age. He was terrible
Speaker 3: in school, except at math and at drawing. Apparently when
Speaker 3: he was in grade school primary school he failed as finals,
Speaker 3: all of them except for math. And I read that
Speaker 3: his father noted in his journal with some affection that
Speaker 3: his son consoled himself by producing a lina type of
Speaker 3: a sunflower. That's how he made himself feel better after
Speaker 3: failing out of school.
Speaker 1: Well, and he was somewhat adept at math early on.
Speaker 1: But it's interesting his work is highly mathematical as far
Speaker 1: as art goes, but later on in life, when he
Speaker 1: was confronted with real mathematicians, he would sort of be like, no,
Speaker 1: not me, man, I'm an artist. Well, I'm not that
Speaker 1: kind of mathematician.
Speaker 3: So I said yes. But he was most of his
Speaker 3: friends were mathematicians. For most of his career, he was
Speaker 3: mostly appreciated by mathematicians and scientists. Those are the people
Speaker 3: who really vibed on his work and drugs that came later.
Speaker 3: That came later, and he got real popular. But I
Speaker 3: saw that somebody made a movie called Journey into Infinity documentary,
Speaker 3: full length documentary.
Speaker 2: I believe the whole.
Speaker 3: Thing's on YouTube, and it starts out.
Speaker 2: The trailer starts out with.
Speaker 3: Graham Nash saying, Hey, I called up mc esher one
Speaker 3: day just to say, mister Esher, I think you're a
Speaker 3: really great artist. That's all I wanted you to say.
Speaker 3: And he said, I don't consider myself an artist. I
Speaker 3: consider myself a mathematician. Oh really, yes, So I'm going
Speaker 3: with Graham Nash's interpretation as counter to this spoke to
Speaker 3: him directly.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, I mean it's crazy. He I mean, not
Speaker 1: to spoil anything, but he died in nineteen seventy two
Speaker 1: at just seventy three. So you know, if he would
Speaker 1: have lived to his like mid eighties, which is somewhat reasonable,
Speaker 1: he would have been like alive in the eighties, which
Speaker 1: just seems so weird.
Speaker 3: It does seem kind of weird, you know, yeah, because
Speaker 3: he was. He seems countercultural for sure, even though him
Speaker 3: his personality was not very countercultural. No, and he didn't
Speaker 3: really have much love for hippies. In fact, he later
Speaker 3: said that the hippies in San Francisco are legally making
Speaker 3: copies of my work. He didn't exactly follow, you know,
Speaker 3: the normal usual beat throughout his lifetime. And he was
Speaker 3: a mathematician. He was a bit of a square, but
Speaker 3: he was also a very imaginative square.
Speaker 1: That's right. I was trying to make a square joke,
Speaker 1: but it's not coming to me.
Speaker 2: Remember that show, Square peg, square peg, square, yeah, square peg.
Speaker 3: Sarah Jesica Parker was she in that. She was also
Speaker 3: in Girls Just Want to Have Fun, That's right.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And I'm going to see her on Broadway next spring.
Speaker 1: Really yeah. She and her husband are co starring in
Speaker 1: Plaza Suite and Neil Simon's Plaza Sweet. Very nice, very
Speaker 1: excited about that. But I'm trying to align it with
Speaker 1: a Bonnie Prince Billy show. But they're like a week apart,
Speaker 1: and I'm like, I can't just stay in New York.
Speaker 3: Time to kill, especially when there's hourly flights between Atlanta
Speaker 3: and New York.
Speaker 1: I know, I may just go see Bonnie Prince Billy
Speaker 1: and come home because he didn't play much. But that's
Speaker 1: a story for another day, all right. So he goes
Speaker 1: to school at Technical College of Delft, not for very long,
Speaker 1: and then he went to the Harlem with two A's
Speaker 1: School of Architecture and Decorative Arts, which is west of Amsterdam,
Speaker 1: not Harlem, New York.
Speaker 3: Well, I think that's what the Harlem, New York is
Speaker 3: named after. Right, Yeah, that's where Bonnie Prince.
Speaker 1: He's at town Hall.
Speaker 2: Actually, Oh is that right? Yeah, we played there.
Speaker 1: That's right. We got our stink on that joint. So
Speaker 1: his dad said, you know, because you know, his dad
Speaker 1: had a lot of money and made money, and even
Speaker 1: though you want to support your kids, you want you
Speaker 1: want to try and edge them into something. Sure, if
Speaker 1: you're that kind of dude, that might be lucrative. So
Speaker 1: he said, hey, you like to draw shapes, why don't
Speaker 1: you go study architecture. And he did that for a
Speaker 1: little while, even though he wasn't super into it. But
Speaker 1: while at school there he had a very fortunate meeting
Speaker 1: by being mentored by one Samuel Jasurin Demisquita m.
Speaker 3: Who would be his mentor, who noticed some of his
Speaker 3: early art. I'm not sure how he saw it, but
Speaker 3: he took one look at Esher's art and said, you
Speaker 3: don't need to go into architecture. Come study under me
Speaker 3: and learn graphic design. And so Escher did. He became
Speaker 3: a graphic designer, which he whether he knew it or not,
Speaker 3: he had been his whole life up to that point.
Speaker 3: All of his work is very graphic in nature and designing.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it really really is.
Speaker 1: But I'm sure his dad in the early, you know,
Speaker 1: nineteen twenties was probably like, is that even a thing, right?
Speaker 2: That sounds made up?
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Well, his dad also, I don't know if you said
Speaker 3: or not, was a civil engineer, so of course he
Speaker 3: would be like, you draw, just go do architecture, right,
Speaker 3: that's what I know, civil engineering, and there's architects in
Speaker 3: the world. Just go do the other thing that I
Speaker 3: don't do.
Speaker 1: And he probably thought graphic design just meant like you're
Speaker 1: gonna make signs.
Speaker 3: Right or post his stamps or Christmas paper, which he
Speaker 3: did later on.
Speaker 1: That's right, until he made a little bit of dough.
Speaker 1: So in the early nineteen twenties, he started on his
Speaker 1: sort of rich kid journey, traveling around Europe on his
Speaker 1: dad's dime.
Speaker 2: On a gap year that was really really long.
Speaker 1: Very long. But on one of these trips he went
Speaker 1: to a couple of places that would end up having
Speaker 1: a big influence on him. Yeah, one in Spain at
Speaker 1: the Alhambra, and then just traveling through southern Italy through
Speaker 1: the countryside.
Speaker 2: Yeah, he just fell in love with Italy.
Speaker 1: Yeah, but in Spain this is this is one that
Speaker 1: didn't bear fruit right away, but he was really fascinated
Speaker 1: by these mosaics and tesselations, which are described as.
Speaker 3: Okay, they are repeating designs that interlock with one another,
Speaker 3: leave no space between one another, and that when you
Speaker 3: fit them together they fully cover a plane, which is
Speaker 3: harder to do than you would think.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Like, if you've ever seen the esher fish sort
Speaker 1: of tesselation.
Speaker 3: The whitefish and the blackfish kind of working in one another.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's a perfect example. And he would do this
Speaker 1: a lot later on. If you've ever played Cubert, Yeah,
Speaker 1: those cubes are tesselations, sure, a certain kind. But he
Speaker 1: got really into this, even though it wasn't like right
Speaker 1: away that he started doing these things that sort of
Speaker 1: came a little bit later. But what he did do
Speaker 1: was started drawing the Italian countryside because he loved it.
Speaker 2: Loved it, I mean, like he went to Italy, he
Speaker 2: was like, this is my home.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 3: And he was quoted at one point in time as
Speaker 3: saying like he never wanted to be an Italian among Italians.
Speaker 3: He liked being a stranger, but he loved Italy, which.
Speaker 1: Is an interesting thing to say. I'm not exactly sure
Speaker 1: what it means.
Speaker 3: I think what he was saying was he he likes
Speaker 3: being a visitor to Italy rather than there's a certain
Speaker 3: amount of responsibility that comes with being one of us,
Speaker 3: you know what I mean. Whereas if you can be
Speaker 3: like that guy over there, who will accept him. We're
Speaker 3: not going to throw rocks at him every time we
Speaker 3: see him or anything like that, and we'll take his
Speaker 3: money and you know, maybe even say hi.
Speaker 2: To him or whatever, but we'll leave him alone.
Speaker 3: We won't include him in our expectations of what it
Speaker 3: means to be a local. Gotcha, That's what I think
Speaker 3: he was after. Clearly I can identify with that.
Speaker 1: Well. That kind of came through in his work too,
Speaker 1: because if you'll notice even in these, before he started
Speaker 1: doing the like trippy three dimensional handstrawing hands and stuff,
Speaker 1: when he was doing countrysides, he didn't do a lot
Speaker 1: of people, didn't do a lot of faces. People were
Speaker 1: very much in the background and nondescript. But even when
Speaker 1: you look at these, when you say Italian still lives
Speaker 1: of countrysides, what came to mind for me were these beautiful, lush,
Speaker 1: colorful recreations of a countryside. Nope, Nope, when you look
Speaker 1: at these, they still look very much like in the
Speaker 1: mc escher style that we all know.
Speaker 2: Yeah, like very clearly. A lot of love them too.
Speaker 1: They're cool.
Speaker 2: Yeah, they're beautiful.
Speaker 3: Yeah, they're black and white and then shades of gray,
Speaker 3: which is all just shading, right, Yeah, but they are
Speaker 3: beautiful in their way and lovely.
Speaker 1: Even I like this stuff more than the trippy stuff.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, yeah, I mean this is something I would
Speaker 1: put on my wall.
Speaker 3: You're an art snob, You're like, oh, I only like
Speaker 3: Esher's early Italian landscapes.
Speaker 2: Oh man, you take that, say the trippy stuff for
Speaker 2: Graham Nash.
Speaker 1: I'm so ashamed.
Speaker 2: No, I think it's great, Chuck. You you have.
Speaker 1: Totally right but they are gorgeous. And then in nineteen
Speaker 1: twenty three he met his wife.
Speaker 2: His name was Jetta jedda Umaker.
Speaker 1: That's right, very nice, thank you.
Speaker 2: She was learned from the.
Speaker 1: They met her in Italy, but she was Swiss and
Speaker 1: she went home and they sent a bunch of love letters.
Speaker 1: It's a very sweet story. I'm sure an mcacsher movie
Speaker 1: would be pretty cool.
Speaker 3: Somebody wrote a script or they wrote a dissertation about
Speaker 3: the process of writing a script about mc esher. It's
Speaker 3: from University of Texas. I wrote it in twenty seventeen.
Speaker 3: I can't remember the name of it. But just look up. Oh,
Speaker 3: just some random stuff comes up if you look up
Speaker 3: mosquito bootprint, which will come up later. But if you
Speaker 3: search that on Google, it brings up Have you ever
Speaker 3: done that? Have you ever been like, I'm bored. I
Speaker 3: want to see what weird stuff I can unlock from Google.
Speaker 3: And it takes a certain amount of skill because Google
Speaker 3: wants to give you exactly what you're looking for. It
Speaker 3: doesn't want to give you just randomness, so you have
Speaker 3: to trick it. So maybe you'll you'll type in a
Speaker 3: weird word or the first three letters of a word
Speaker 3: or something like that, and weird stuff will start to come.
Speaker 3: Well if you type in mosquito. Probably only like the
Speaker 3: first three of them pertained to m cescher and the
Speaker 3: rest are just a random assortment of links.
Speaker 1: I remember, early in the days of Google, we had
Speaker 1: a mutual friend who they did this what I thought
Speaker 1: was a very dumb game where they would try and
Speaker 1: find two words together that they would try and produce
Speaker 1: the fewest amount of Google results. And whoever could put
Speaker 1: two words together that found the fewest one. Yeah, And
Speaker 1: I don't know if you remember them doing that, but
Speaker 1: so I don't know. I don't remember you talking about
Speaker 1: lost a waste of time.
Speaker 2: But I remember that some guy did, like a ted
Speaker 2: talk about that.
Speaker 1: Oh really yeah, Oh well, maybe I'm the dummy.
Speaker 2: No, no, no, it was.
Speaker 1: I mean, look at me. I'd like mcsher's early work.
Speaker 2: I think that's awesome. I mean, what taste. Yeah, you know.
Speaker 1: So he meets and gets married. She returns to Italy
Speaker 1: and they married nineteen twenty four.
Speaker 2: Do you mean Jeda Umaker.
Speaker 1: That's right. She would become Jeda Esher.
Speaker 2: Jeda Umiker Esher, and.
Speaker 1: They had a son named Georgio. Later had sons, Arthur
Speaker 1: and Jan and uh, they were still just sort of
Speaker 1: traveling and his dad was even though he was married,
Speaker 1: his dad was still footing the bill.
Speaker 3: Esher's dad father, Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, which I was just
Speaker 3: thinking about it. I was like, gosh, you know, I
Speaker 3: get a benefactor. Wake up every day and look at
Speaker 3: yourself in the mirror.
Speaker 1: But if you're if you're in the mirror sphere.
Speaker 2: Right, how do you and then how do you draw it?
Speaker 1: Yeah?
Speaker 3: So amazingly the the father Esher's father though, and like,
Speaker 3: what better way to spend your money than to just
Speaker 3: be like, this is what you want to do with
Speaker 3: your life, son, you want to pursue art and live
Speaker 3: in beautiful Italy than like here, this is what I
Speaker 3: want for you.
Speaker 1: And that's like, that's awesome.
Speaker 3: That's the pinnacle of what a parent can do for
Speaker 3: their child in a lot of ways.
Speaker 1: No, totally know.
Speaker 3: It's not like, hey, why don't you go, you know,
Speaker 3: take up Heroin and here's a bunch of money for
Speaker 3: you to like lay around in a BEFA.
Speaker 1: True I want to know more. I'm not I hope
Speaker 1: I'm not coming across his cynical but I wonder if
Speaker 1: some of this was like, he'll come around if I
Speaker 1: you know, to architecture or whatever.
Speaker 3: Right, you kept waiting for the part where his father
Speaker 3: cuts him off. I was his father apparently wouldn't like that.
Speaker 3: All right, I know how you feel. I'm not trying
Speaker 3: to talk you into my way of thinking. I'm not
Speaker 3: saying like I had. I started out thinking the same
Speaker 3: way you did. And then something happened. I was like, Oh,
Speaker 3: it was actually really neat of his dad.
Speaker 1: It was it all seems above board. Yeah. So World
Speaker 1: War Two has a profound effect on Esher and his work.
Speaker 1: In nineteen thirty five, he learned that they were making
Speaker 1: his nine year old son, Georgio, marching fascist youth parades,
Speaker 1: and he said, pack your bags, we're going to Switzerland.
Speaker 3: That is the appropriate response to that news. Yeah, we're
Speaker 3: getting out of here marching for Mussolini.
Speaker 1: Have you seen Jojo Rabbit yet?
Speaker 2: No? Is it good? Is it as good as it looks?
Speaker 1: It's great?
Speaker 2: Oh, I can't wait.
Speaker 1: It's great. Everything about it is created.
Speaker 2: I need to see it in theater. It doesn't like
Speaker 2: one I have to see any No.
Speaker 1: I mean, you know, it's always fun to laugh with
Speaker 1: a big group of people, although by now it's probably
Speaker 1: thinned out. Yeah, and I was laughing a lot and
Speaker 1: people weren't laughing. Oh, I like that kind of one
Speaker 1: of those deals. Yeah, I mean, it's a movie about
Speaker 1: a kid having Hitler as an imaginary friend.
Speaker 2: So don't tell me that I didn't know. I know,
Speaker 2: I had no idea Itler's on the poster. I know,
Speaker 2: but I didn't know he was an imaginary friend. Oh,
Speaker 2: get out of my brain.
Speaker 1: Sorry, that really doesn't spoil anything.
Speaker 2: Okay, like, don't tell me any not some big reveal.
Speaker 1: So they go to Switzerland. All apologies, it's really not a.
Speaker 2: Big deal as long as it's not a big spoiler.
Speaker 1: No, no, no, no, of course not.
Speaker 2: Okay.
Speaker 1: They go to Switzerland and he even though he did
Speaker 1: not like the mountains, he didn't like the snow, did
Speaker 1: not like cold weather. So they moved to Belgium after
Speaker 1: a couple of years.
Speaker 2: Which is just beautiful compared to Switzerland.
Speaker 1: Belgium's nice sure in the nineteen In May of nineteen forty, though,
Speaker 1: the Nazzis invaded Belgium, and so they moved to the
Speaker 1: Netherlands in nineteen forty one.
Speaker 3: Where the Nazis already were. Yeah, I guess they really
Speaker 3: can't occupy it again.
Speaker 1: Well in its home right, and they settled in Barn,
Speaker 1: which is about twenty three miles southeast of Amsterdam.
Speaker 2: I don't know if that's how you're supposed to say it.
Speaker 1: B aa aaar inn, I like it's probably Barn.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, I'll bet you just nailed it.
Speaker 1: I think so. But Dutchess very strange. It is language,
Speaker 1: but it's supposed that's strange. But just for my English,
Speaker 1: dumb English.
Speaker 2: Years, supposedly English is the strangest of all.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I'm sure it's just.
Speaker 2: A hybrid mongrel language.
Speaker 3: Yet that doesn't make any sense to anyone who's not
Speaker 3: a native speaker of it.
Speaker 1: You know, what is an interesting language is Welsh. Because
Speaker 1: I'm watching the Crown and when Prince Charles starts coming around,
Speaker 1: Prince of Wales, there's people speaking Welsh. And I was
Speaker 1: very ignorant about even knowing that what it sounds like,
Speaker 1: what it sounds like, and that it was still spoken,
Speaker 1: and it was a very odd hybrid. It sounded like
Speaker 1: of several different things.
Speaker 2: It's all old Celtic stuff.
Speaker 1: Yeah, very unusual.
Speaker 3: Gallic, gallic, Yeah, I think it's Gallic. It's the language group,
Speaker 3: one of the two.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Everything I know about Welsh I learned from super furry animals.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, because that guy's welsh Man.
Speaker 1: I saw them blood granddaddy off the stage one time.
Speaker 2: Oh you saw him live?
Speaker 1: Oh I think you told me that he melted. My
Speaker 1: brain was so good all that. So they're traveling around still,
Speaker 1: even though they're settled in Barn, and they go back
Speaker 1: to al Hambra in Spain, which I don't think we
Speaker 1: said what that is.
Speaker 3: No, it's a thirteenth century Moorish castle from when the
Speaker 3: Moors conquered Spain.
Speaker 1: It's beautiful.
Speaker 2: It is very beautiful, and they.
Speaker 3: Built it in the Moorish style and then it was
Speaker 3: eventually like taken over by the Christian like royalty that
Speaker 3: explored the New World and all that stuff. Yeah, but
Speaker 3: this castle was done in these tiles that are noun
Speaker 3: for being some of the most beautiful geometric like Islamic
Speaker 3: patterns you've ever seen in your life. And they got
Speaker 3: to esher. He'd seen him before, but it was I
Speaker 3: guess he was like, oh, that's kind of cool. But
Speaker 3: the second trip that he went back with after they
Speaker 3: moved from Switzerland. I think to Belgium or maybe to Switzerland.
Speaker 3: That's when he was like, I am obsessed with these
Speaker 3: Now these tessellations.
Speaker 1: Started drawing him. Jetted it too. It says that they
Speaker 1: worked together. So I didn't know that she was an artist.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I didn't either.
Speaker 1: But they World War two comes back around, will not
Speaker 1: comes back around. It never left, let's be honest. But
Speaker 1: Spain would devolve into civil war. And so this meant
Speaker 1: that he was kind of stuck in outside of Amsterdam
Speaker 1: for a little while longer. Yeah, he wasn't doing as
Speaker 1: much traveling.
Speaker 3: No, he was in the Netherlands and he rekindled his
Speaker 3: friendship with Mosquita, his old mentor who had stayed in
Speaker 3: Netherlands this whole time. And Mosquita was Jewish and he
Speaker 3: was taken away by the Nazis. Eventually he was killed
Speaker 3: at Auschwitz, I believe, with his wife and their son
Speaker 3: was also killed at another concentration camp by the Nazis.
Speaker 3: And this really got to esher, like, this is one
Speaker 3: of his dear friends. And he had a work a
Speaker 3: sketch of Mosquitos. When he went to his house to
Speaker 3: visit Mosquito, he found the door was opened and they
Speaker 3: weren't there, and they'd clearly been taken by the Nazis.
Speaker 3: And one of the pieces of artwork that he gathered
Speaker 3: together to preserve was a sketch of mosquitos that had
Speaker 3: a Nazi bootprint on it.
Speaker 1: And that's what you were referenced earlier with your.
Speaker 2: Google search mosquito bootprint.
Speaker 1: Did you Was there a picture of it?
Speaker 2: No?
Speaker 3: I couldn't find anything aside from the fact that it
Speaker 3: was a sketch, not that it was a sketch of
Speaker 3: what or anything like that, just that there was a
Speaker 3: sketch of mosquitos that had boor bootprint, and the Escher
Speaker 3: hung onto this his his entire life. It was very
Speaker 3: important to him.
Speaker 2: And he was not.
Speaker 3: A very flowery, like like passionate man or anything like that.
Speaker 3: I get the impression that he and this is esture
Speaker 3: I'm talking about, that he internalized a lot of stuff,
Speaker 3: and I think that him holding on to that piece
Speaker 3: of art was probably more significant than even it appears
Speaker 3: on the outside.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and supposedly hid some people from a Jewish family
Speaker 1: during the Nazi occupation years, and also during those same years,
Speaker 1: did not exhibit or release any prints.
Speaker 3: Wait a minute, I think you just said hid some
Speaker 3: people from a Jewish family, or did you say hid
Speaker 3: some members of a Jewish family.
Speaker 1: Well, people members of a Jewish family.
Speaker 2: But you said from I think yeah.
Speaker 1: I mean like they were from a Jewish family.
Speaker 2: Oh oh, gotcha, gotcha, gotcha.
Speaker 1: He didn't hide them from right, don't.
Speaker 2: Tell the Jewish family that you're hiding over here.
Speaker 1: No, that would have been weird. So maybe we should
Speaker 1: take a break now.
Speaker 2: Oh, I think it's unraveled for the point the guys
Speaker 2: are yeah.
Speaker 3: All right, okay, Chuck. So World War two kind of
Speaker 3: comes and goes around esher despite his best efforts to
Speaker 3: escape it, and it definitely had a mark on him.
Speaker 3: But one of the other things that that had a
Speaker 3: really big mark on him was having to move from
Speaker 3: Italy because, like you said, like he was married, had
Speaker 3: a family, his father was still supporting him, and every
Speaker 3: spring and summer he would just tour the Italian countryside
Speaker 3: and visit small quaint towns be inspired to keep making
Speaker 3: these Italian landscapes. But Ed makes a really great point
Speaker 3: here that his Italian landscapes are very handsome works of art,
Speaker 3: very beautiful, my favorite, technically proficient. They're Chuck's favorite. But
Speaker 3: you would almost certainly have never seen them in your
Speaker 3: entire life now were it not for him moving from Italy,
Speaker 3: because in doing so he lost his source of inspiration
Speaker 3: and was forced to kind of turn inward because he
Speaker 3: hated what Switzerland looked like. He wasn't apparently very inspired
Speaker 3: by his home country of the Netherlands, so he had
Speaker 3: to kind of turn inward into his own imagination and
Speaker 3: start coming up with new subjects, and in doing that,
Speaker 3: the true Escher was unlocked.
Speaker 1: Yeah, because early and like a lot of artists early
Speaker 1: in their career, they kind of free ranged through different styles,
Speaker 1: trying to find their own personal thing.
Speaker 3: He had a very very colorful clown period. It's very bizarre.
Speaker 3: Doesn't fit with the rest of it.
Speaker 1: Arry, John Wayne Gacy, You're right, but you can very
Speaker 1: clearly see if you look at Mosquito's work that connection
Speaker 1: and the influence from him. Although Mosquita did a lot
Speaker 1: of sort of graphic portraits and things like that, whereas
Speaker 1: Esher didn't really worry too much about humans and faces.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, they were just kind of like almost afterthoughts.
Speaker 1: But early on he did start experimenting with stuff that
Speaker 1: would later become sort of his hallmark. When he did
Speaker 1: do a sketch of a building, let's say it would
Speaker 1: be from this really like tall odd angle looking down
Speaker 1: on it, very severe angles and like a horizon, or
Speaker 1: trees that sort of go on into infinity. Stuff like that,
Speaker 1: that would become very much his style. Later on, and
Speaker 1: ed Various Stuteley points out that there's something about his
Speaker 1: style that I don't know how dark of a person
Speaker 1: he was emotionally, but there is something about the severity
Speaker 1: of these angles and a lot of his work that
Speaker 1: was just sort of uneasy feeling, right. It didn't look
Speaker 1: like just some beautiful, colorful Italian countryside. There was something
Speaker 1: kind of strange and unusual about it.
Speaker 3: Something about the contrast of black and white definitely does
Speaker 3: it too. And he was such a master of shading
Speaker 3: that if something was stark and black and white, I mean,
Speaker 3: unless it was his earliest work, was because he wanted
Speaker 3: it to look that way and to make it stark
Speaker 3: and kind of unsettling like that. But yeah, there's like
Speaker 3: a certain amount of dread in a lot of his stuff. Yeah,
Speaker 3: and it's not something you can easily put your finger on,
Speaker 3: but it's definitely there.
Speaker 1: Yeah, like did you see the mummified priests? Yeah, that
Speaker 1: was creepy and then one of them.
Speaker 2: Isn't it more creepy to actually do that in real
Speaker 2: life to stand them up like that? And these little alcoves?
Speaker 1: Oh? Yeah, absolutely sure.
Speaker 2: He was just don't kill the messenger.
Speaker 1: And he would have sometimes skulls featured in some of
Speaker 1: his work and stuff like that, like the one of
Speaker 1: the eye believe called eye right in the middle of
Speaker 1: the people is a skull staring back. So he had
Speaker 1: little touches like that without going full like you know,
Speaker 1: love Craftian.
Speaker 2: Right or Goya or something like that.
Speaker 1: And I don't even know, Bosh, I don't know who
Speaker 1: that is.
Speaker 2: Sure you do, I'm just kidding, Okay, I know those people. Okay, So.
Speaker 1: His I guess this is where we get to the
Speaker 1: fact of the show for me. Take it away, Chuck,
Speaker 1: because folks, if you've ever seen an mcsher print and
Speaker 1: you thought, man, that guy could sure draw a print,
Speaker 1: imagine cutting that out of wood in reverse, in reverse.
Speaker 3: Because that's what he did. A lot of his stuff
Speaker 3: were wood cuts. Even harder than that, Chuck, is the lithograph.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so a woodcut if you've ever made used a
Speaker 1: stamp or made a potato stamp as your kid.
Speaker 2: You're basically.
Speaker 1: Well, that's what it is. He's actually carving the stuff
Speaker 1: into wood as a negative image, because then when you
Speaker 1: run ink over it and stamp it, you get the
Speaker 1: positive image. And it's just incredible. I mean, it's hard
Speaker 1: enough to draw and sketch this stuff, much less cut
Speaker 1: it out of wood.
Speaker 3: Right, So just take a step back and think about
Speaker 3: the eshers that you've seen before. Imagine that they were
Speaker 3: originally carved out of wood, and now imagine that to
Speaker 3: get even more detailing. Because you can't adjust how much
Speaker 3: ink a certain part of the woodblock gets. It's all
Speaker 3: going to get an even layer of ink. So to
Speaker 3: shade something you have to do cross hatching, lines, stippling
Speaker 3: something like that. But to get really detailed with shading,
Speaker 3: you need multiple blocks of the same image in the
Speaker 3: exact same size, with different parts accentuated so that you
Speaker 3: can layer over. You can take the same paper and
Speaker 3: layer them on different blocks and line them up so
Speaker 3: that you have layers to this image. That was the
Speaker 3: level of the woodcuts this guy was doing.
Speaker 1: Yeah, like that's sort of like a T shirt hippie exactly.
Speaker 1: Screen printing, like a four color shirt. You gotta layer,
Speaker 1: you gotta put it on exactly in the in the
Speaker 1: spot that it needs to go each time drag that
Speaker 1: inc across so it's not you know, off by a
Speaker 1: centimeter right, because it would look bad.
Speaker 3: So the woodcuts, especially as earlier woodcuts, you can tell
Speaker 3: their woodcuts.
Speaker 2: They look like woodcuts. Some of them do not.
Speaker 3: There's some of the Italian countryside that favorites are just yeah,
Speaker 3: are just astounding. And when you stop and think about
Speaker 3: the idea that they there's not a drawing that there
Speaker 3: wood cuts, multiple blocked woodcuts, is pretty astounding. But like
Speaker 3: I was saying to me, even even more difficult is
Speaker 3: making the lithograph. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I think I talked about this on some other episode.
Speaker 1: I know it talked about batikuing, but I also talked
Speaker 1: to in industrial arts. We did of lithography in that
Speaker 1: social experiment high school. Yeah, exactly, we did offset lithography,
Speaker 1: which basically, I mean that's the process today. I mean,
Speaker 1: that's how they make newspapers, posters, books, maps, kind of
Speaker 1: everything is with offset lithography.
Speaker 3: It was in do you remember it was in the
Speaker 3: etch A sketch episode. Oh that's what Ohio Art originally
Speaker 3: did was lithography.
Speaker 1: Okay, well this is this is pre like today, use
Speaker 1: like aluminum or some other kind of metal sheet and
Speaker 1: these emulsions and chemicals. Back then it was drawn onto limestone,
Speaker 1: a flat slab of limestone with a grease pencil, and
Speaker 1: then use a chemical treatment on the areas that basically
Speaker 1: water and ink don't mix. It's sort of all built
Speaker 1: on that principle. So the areas where you have written
Speaker 1: in Greece do not hold that ink or is it
Speaker 1: the other way around?
Speaker 2: No, I think they don't hold the a.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Again, what you're doing is creating a negative image,
Speaker 1: just like the woodcut essentially.
Speaker 3: Right, So you've got this attraction and repulsion interplay between ink,
Speaker 3: water and grease, and when you put it all together
Speaker 3: on limestone, it makes these extremely subtle gradients of shading
Speaker 3: that are kind of like a hallmark of some of
Speaker 3: Esher's more well known works. Yeah, the hands drawing hands, right, Yeah,
Speaker 3: that was a lithograph. He made that with limestone and
Speaker 3: grease pen and ink, and did it in reverse too,
Speaker 3: because just like with a woodblock, you have to create
Speaker 3: the negative of it, Yah, because you want the positive
Speaker 3: image on the paper.
Speaker 1: You have a very special brain if this is if
Speaker 1: you can work this stuff out as an artist. Yes,
Speaker 1: you know, it's not saying that any kind of artist
Speaker 1: is any better or worse or smarter than the next.
Speaker 1: But your brain just has to be wired a little
Speaker 1: bit differently to thinking negatives.
Speaker 3: Like that, like a mathematician. Basically, yeah, your brain has
Speaker 3: to be set up that way.
Speaker 1: Yeah, absolutely, But lithography is difficult, very labor intensive. So
Speaker 1: later on he would hire a lithographer to actually create
Speaker 1: his prints after he's sketched and drawn the stuff out.
Speaker 1: Smart move, And he would destroy the limestone. Well, he
Speaker 1: wouldn't destroy it, he would scrape it clean so we
Speaker 1: could reuse it. So that's the reason. Like if you
Speaker 1: want to buy an original mc escher, good luck.
Speaker 3: Well there's no such thing. There's original prints that he made,
Speaker 3: right And apparently you're.
Speaker 1: Not going to get your hands one of those limestones.
Speaker 3: No, but there are a couple of those left over.
Speaker 3: But he said that he wanted him. I think canceled
Speaker 3: is what they call it in his will right where
Speaker 3: they intentionally damage it so that even if you got
Speaker 3: a hold of one of these things, and you were like, I'm.
Speaker 2: Going to print me a brain new Esher.
Speaker 3: There'd be like the like the negative image of Snegel
Speaker 3: Puss like comes through the hand drawing hands picture.
Speaker 1: And he did not do many original prints from those
Speaker 1: original woodcuts and lithographs either. I think he only did
Speaker 1: ten of still life with spherical mirror, and so anything, obviously,
Speaker 1: anything you'd buy in a Spencer Gifts is going to
Speaker 1: be a print anyway.
Speaker 2: What they told me it was an original.
Speaker 1: You mean bikini lady on Corvette.
Speaker 2: You can probably get the original of that at Spencer.
Speaker 1: Probably could the original negative.
Speaker 2: Bikini lady on Corvette. Man remember that Starfield with Lamborghini.
Speaker 1: These lithographs, he would also layer those just like you
Speaker 1: did with the woodcuts, creating multiple plates to layer on
Speaker 1: top of one another for shading and toning and stuff
Speaker 1: like that. It's just amazing. I mean I did it
Speaker 1: to make a Monkey's T shirt.
Speaker 2: I forgot used to screenprint too, so did.
Speaker 1: I Yeah, yeah, well actually the Monkeys T shirt was
Speaker 1: screen printing. I think can remember what I did for
Speaker 1: a lithograph. I think something to make a notepad that
Speaker 1: said like my name and something else.
Speaker 3: Oh that's right. So you you screenprinted in industrial arts? Yes, okay,
Speaker 3: like you were you ever employed gainfully as a screen Oh? No?
Speaker 2: Oh no?
Speaker 1: Did you do that?
Speaker 2: Yeah?
Speaker 1: No, I mean I would have loved to it. I
Speaker 1: wasn't good enough.
Speaker 2: It's always not hard.
Speaker 1: Yeah, but you would draw the stuff or you would.
Speaker 3: No, no, no, no, I would like burn the screens and
Speaker 3: everything and drag the ink through.
Speaker 1: And you do that for a job, sure, well like
Speaker 1: high school?
Speaker 2: No, this is is college.
Speaker 1: What kind of dough do you make doing that?
Speaker 2: Jack?
Speaker 1: Yeah?
Speaker 2: But it's fun. It's cool work, you know, you just
Speaker 2: listening to be in a few bucks pretty much hang
Speaker 2: out with some cool dudes, and you know's.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, I gotcha.
Speaker 2: It's a good, good early college job, you know what
Speaker 2: I mean.
Speaker 1: I think it'd be cool. And I mean there's a
Speaker 1: very cool T shirt local T shirt shop here that
Speaker 1: every time I go over there because that's where our friend, uh,
Speaker 1: the patchmaker, Katie Culp works, or at least she used
Speaker 1: to think she's got her own space now, but she
Speaker 1: shared a space with T shirt dudes. And anytime I'm
Speaker 1: in there, it's just a good vibe, you know what
Speaker 1: I mean, It really is there a lot worse places
Speaker 1: to spend your time than a T shirt shop? So oh,
Speaker 1: another thing we should point out is that he did
Speaker 1: do color occasionally, but color was a hole different. You
Speaker 1: had to do a separate stone for each color. So
Speaker 1: that's why a lot of his stuff ended up in
Speaker 1: black and white, aside from the fact that he liked
Speaker 1: it as well.
Speaker 2: Yeah, he seemed to be very pleased with black and
Speaker 2: white in general.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I'm not saying he was lazy.
Speaker 3: No, but let's take a step back here for a
Speaker 3: second and examine the idea that you thought mc yesher
Speaker 3: was a pretty amazing artist when you just imagined that
Speaker 3: he was sitting in his studio drawing all of this
Speaker 3: stuff with a pencil. Now, really let it sink in
Speaker 3: that he carved these things in reverse out of wood
Speaker 3: or limestone or limestone and then use these crazy techniques
Speaker 3: to make these extraordinarily detailed, incredibly precise and technical works
Speaker 3: of art.
Speaker 1: It's amazing. It really is amazing, truly astounding. And like
Speaker 1: you said, there are a few of those stones and
Speaker 1: woodblocks that are owned by the mc escher Foundation.
Speaker 2: Snago puts on every single one of them.
Speaker 1: And apparently they will display them occasionally along with his works.
Speaker 3: Right, which I imagine seeing that and then looking at the
Speaker 3: work of art, and then going back and looking at
Speaker 3: that limestone and then looking at the work of art.
Speaker 3: It really kind of sinks in, like, oh my.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I'd love to see an exhibition of his stuff.
Speaker 2: Me too. They've picked up in recent years, have they.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it seems like he's being more appreciated as a
Speaker 1: truly great artist and less college dorm wall material.
Speaker 2: Yeap.
Speaker 3: In twenty eleven, the record for highest overall attendance in
Speaker 3: the world out of all the museums in the world
Speaker 3: that year was at the Centro Cultural Banco to Brazil,
Speaker 3: which held their Magical World of Escher exhibit. Oh wow,
Speaker 3: five hundred and seventy thousand visitors about ten thousand a day.
Speaker 1: Holy cow.
Speaker 2: Yep.
Speaker 1: So if you think lithography and woodcutting sounds difficult, we'll
Speaker 1: talk a minute about mesotint. That is sort of like woodcutting,
Speaker 1: except you're using a sheet of copper that starts out
Speaker 1: as a rough surface and then use these little tools
Speaker 1: to smooth out things that are going to be the image,
Speaker 1: applying that ink and then wiping it off.
Speaker 3: Right, So the places you smooth out are don't have ink.
Speaker 3: The ones that are going to be white on the
Speaker 3: paper are blank on the paper. Right, it's the rough
Speaker 3: edges that hold the ink. So you cover the whole
Speaker 3: thing with ink, wipe it down. The smooth start parts
Speaker 3: come clean. The rough stuff has the ink, and you
Speaker 3: can use this like this is this isn't like, oh
Speaker 3: look I'm made an X, right, this is like incredibly
Speaker 3: fine stippling is possible with these copper plates and all
Speaker 3: this mezotint And that I that you were talking about
Speaker 3: with the skull. If you go back and look at that,
Speaker 3: that was a mezzo tint.
Speaker 1: Yes, it was de drop, very detailed cupped leaf showing
Speaker 1: a single drop of dew inside it, with all kinds
Speaker 1: of cool reflections. But Escher called this the black art.
Speaker 1: He only made eight of these because it is a
Speaker 1: real undertaking, and I think he's just he did a
Speaker 1: handful of him and then moved on to the far
Speaker 1: easier wood cutting.
Speaker 2: Right right, He's like, oh, I came back, baby.
Speaker 1: All right, We'll take a break and then we'll come
Speaker 1: back and pick up with his life story again, which
Speaker 1: is I believeably left off in what end of world
Speaker 1: War two sounds right, all right, Okay, world War Two
Speaker 1: is over. Mc esher was, like a lot of people,
Speaker 1: very rattled by that experience in Europe. And at this
Speaker 1: point he's still is not a super famous artist making
Speaker 1: tons of money.
Speaker 3: No, but he's more famous than this makes him out
Speaker 3: to be. Like, yeah, he's got some renown in the Netherlands,
Speaker 3: there's certain circles of bits. Yeah, but he's not anywhere
Speaker 3: anywhere even approaching how he is today or how he
Speaker 3: has been the last few decades, since about like the
Speaker 3: late sixties.
Speaker 1: Yeah, college dorms have not yet started putting his stuff everywhere.
Speaker 3: No, but the people who who most appreciate what he's
Speaker 3: doing are scientists and mathematicians who are like, this is astounding.
Speaker 3: This guy is taking what we write out as formulas
Speaker 3: and turning them into art and making them precise. Yeah,
Speaker 3: like you could describe this work of art as a formula.
Speaker 3: That is what mc esher was able to do. He
Speaker 3: was able to take math and translate it into a
Speaker 3: visual art.
Speaker 1: Yeah. And you know, remember what you said earlier, This
Speaker 1: is where we are in his life. Where he is
Speaker 1: he is not in the Italian countryside.
Speaker 2: He's been ripped from its bodice, So.
Speaker 1: His muse is gone and he is now looking inward
Speaker 1: for his inspiration in his own unique brain.
Speaker 2: He's being forced into his own bodice. Face first.
Speaker 1: This is where he starts with these tessellations, more elaborate
Speaker 1: geometric shapes. He's doing the lizards and the birds and
Speaker 1: the insects. His tessellations, really really cool stuff. His brother said, hey, dude,
Speaker 1: you know what you should do is go talk to
Speaker 1: a crystallographer. He's like, if you want to talk detailed
Speaker 1: shapes in maths, And he does so, and that taught
Speaker 1: him a lot. And then he learned about the seventeen
Speaker 1: wallpaper groups, which is so dense that I, you know,
Speaker 1: how much do we even want to talk about it?
Speaker 2: Well, we'll just sum it up.
Speaker 3: The seventeen wallpaper groups basically is a mathematical concept that
Speaker 3: says every geometric pattern two dimensional geometric pattern falls into
Speaker 3: one of seventeen categories. There's only seventeen, and they're called,
Speaker 3: kind of half jokingly, the wallpaper groups because wallpaper has
Speaker 3: geometric patterns. I usually right, Escher couldn't understand it mathematically.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it was proved out twice independently that there are
Speaker 1: seventeen wallpapers the mathematical proof.
Speaker 3: One of the things that's interesting, Chuck, is the Alhambra
Speaker 3: apparently is the only place in the world that contains
Speaker 3: all seventeen geometric wallpaper.
Speaker 1: Patterns within its walls. That's pretty cool.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so of course this would appeal to Esher, But
Speaker 3: he didn't understand. He couldn't sit down and explain, like,
Speaker 3: we can't what the seventeen wallpaper groups are or what
Speaker 3: they mean mathematically, but he understood them intuitively, and as
Speaker 3: he became friends with mathematicians know about mid career, he
Speaker 3: was apparently kind of amused to find like, you know,
Speaker 3: these guys spend all this time writing this stuff out
Speaker 3: in these formulas, and I just know it. It was
Speaker 3: almost like I was born knowing it. Yeah, you know,
Speaker 3: I mean, I guess he was real cocky. Yeah, he
Speaker 3: wasn't really just kidding.
Speaker 1: And I didn't get the idea either that he was
Speaker 1: like take your math and shove it. He was just
Speaker 1: a little more amused that, like, you've got these mathematical
Speaker 1: proofs that like, I'm drawing this stuff from my creative
Speaker 1: brain on limestone on limestone, cutting it out of wood.
Speaker 1: So I think he appreciated the way they coalesced. But
Speaker 1: and he was very like you said, most of his
Speaker 1: friends were mathematicians I think later in life. Who did
Speaker 1: he have Penroses? Yeah, Roger and Lionel Pinrose, which I
Speaker 1: love how it's described here, father and son mathematician team. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: you know those.
Speaker 3: They were matching dolphin shorts, oh man, part of their uniform.
Speaker 1: I wish people still wore those. Yeah, did you ever
Speaker 1: wear those?
Speaker 2: No, we were a little before my time.
Speaker 1: Well, they were for joggers and runners.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and it twenty eleven and who do I forgot
Speaker 3: about that?
Speaker 2: Yeah? That is what Hooters waitresses.
Speaker 1: Orange shorts with remember bronze panny house.
Speaker 2: There Yeah, and then chunky white socks.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and it was a very back high tops.
Speaker 2: It was bizarre.
Speaker 1: Interesting.
Speaker 3: Look somebody put that together and not a woman. Do
Speaker 3: you remember there was a there was a Hooters airline
Speaker 3: what yeah, wow.
Speaker 1: That kind of rings a bell. Yeah. That was very
Speaker 1: short lived, I imagine.
Speaker 2: I believe, so it was pretty short lived.
Speaker 1: Interesting, I guess. Yeah, so you would get asked like
Speaker 1: what kind of drink and what style of chicken wing
Speaker 1: do you want to get?
Speaker 3: They did serve chicken wings on those of course, but
Speaker 3: can you imagine being on an airplane being forced to
Speaker 3: smell chicken wings the whole time if you didn't like it.
Speaker 1: Uh, that's like every flight I ever take. It's true,
Speaker 1: there's somebody with some stinky food.
Speaker 3: You know. If I sit next to somebody on the
Speaker 3: plane and I'm going to eat, I ask them if
Speaker 3: it's okay if I eat.
Speaker 1: Like if you bring food on yep. I don't bring
Speaker 1: food onto.
Speaker 2: A flight sometimes, dude, you just have to. Yeah, it's
Speaker 2: a long flight.
Speaker 3: And sure, I'm not going to run out of turkey
Speaker 3: wraps like in the first half a second.
Speaker 1: So you just pull out your what my kung pow
Speaker 1: out of your pocket you had just in case they're
Speaker 1: out of turkey wraps?
Speaker 2: Yea, not even in the containers, just in my pocket.
Speaker 1: Oh goodness. So I thought this part was sort of
Speaker 1: amusing how orderly he always was with his art, and
Speaker 1: he tried to get into chaos a bit in this
Speaker 1: one work contrast parentheses Order and chaos parentheses, wherein he
Speaker 1: went and dug up a bunch of trash and said
Speaker 1: I will draw chaos, and it ended up being if
Speaker 1: you go and look at it. There's like a broken bottle,
Speaker 1: broken eggshell, an open sardine tin and broken clay pipe
Speaker 1: and some other refuse drawn to like perfect or I
Speaker 1: guess woodcutter lithographed with perfect, beautiful precision.
Speaker 2: Right was chaos his interpretation of it.
Speaker 1: He just couldn't do it.
Speaker 3: He was very much preoccupied with Kassi. He has a
Speaker 3: very famous quote, probably his most famous quat quote, we
Speaker 3: adore chaos because we'd love to produce order. And he's like,
Speaker 3: by we, I mean me, Yeah.
Speaker 1: Sure, sounded very much like an eye statement.
Speaker 3: But he was very much into geometry and precision and
Speaker 3: clean lines and all that.
Speaker 1: Yeah. And also as his career would progress, this this
Speaker 1: these repeating patterns on a finite space. If you've seen
Speaker 1: his circle limit series, that's where you'll find the fish
Speaker 1: or these demons. And they start out with like one
Speaker 1: in the center, and then there's a pattern all around,
Speaker 1: and as it gets closer and close to the edge,
Speaker 1: they get smaller and smaller and smaller, and you can
Speaker 1: just sort of imagine that there is no end to
Speaker 1: these shapes.
Speaker 3: That they're just going infinitely around the sphere. Yeah, perfectly,
Speaker 3: but again you have to stop and remind yourself this
Speaker 3: is a two dimensional image I'm looking at right, and
Speaker 3: then secondly.
Speaker 2: This is cut out of wood.
Speaker 3: But yeah, he apparently made a three dimensional wood carving
Speaker 3: of his circle limits series later on in life. And
Speaker 3: I'll bet that's spectacular to see too. He made it,
Speaker 3: what a three dimensional wood carving of it, basically proving
Speaker 3: that his two dimensional drawing was accurate. Yeah, because he
Speaker 3: made it in the three dimensions, that's awesome.
Speaker 2: Yeah, he was just showing off towards the end there.
Speaker 1: I like reptiles that's going aside from his early countryside
Speaker 1: work that is far superior. The tessellation of the lizards
Speaker 1: and reptiles is really neat. That's the one that has
Speaker 1: the lizards being like crawling off of the page as
Speaker 1: a drawn image, circling around, walking over some books, and
Speaker 1: then crawling back over onto the page as a drawn image. Yeah,
Speaker 1: very neat.
Speaker 3: It's a lot like the hands drawing or drawing hands
Speaker 3: one kind of where the hands are drawing themselves or
Speaker 3: one another, but they're also three dimensional two and that
Speaker 3: actually kind of jobs with another quote he had then,
Speaker 3: I think really sums that style of art up. He said,
Speaker 3: the flat shape irritates me. I feel as if I
Speaker 3: were shouting to my figures, you are too fictitious for me.
Speaker 3: You just lie there, static and frozen together. Do something.
Speaker 3: Come out of there and show me what you are
Speaker 3: capable of. And he would shout it just like that.
Speaker 1: And then Jetta would back out of the room slowly. Okay, dear,
Speaker 1: here's your t Yeah. And that sort of brings us too.
Speaker 1: With the reptiles. We need to talk a little bit
Speaker 1: about illusion because it started sort of early on. He
Speaker 1: was preoccupied with illusion, whether it was like these lizards
Speaker 1: coming off the page or still Life in Street, which
Speaker 1: is a tabletop that blends into a street scene.
Speaker 2: That's a neat one.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's really cool. I like that one too, or relativity,
Speaker 1: which I don't know. I mean, is there a most
Speaker 1: famous maybe hands?
Speaker 3: It's between hands self portrait with sphere and relativity.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Relativity is the one with the staircases.
Speaker 3: Yeah, people going up and downstairs that don't go anywhere,
Speaker 3: but they go everywhere and they circle back on each
Speaker 3: other and it's just an impossible staircase actually called Penrose Stairs.
Speaker 1: Oh really.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: After the famous father and son mathemagician.
Speaker 2: Team and speaking of the Penrose as they did.
Speaker 1: I'd just say, mathemagician, I just invented something I.
Speaker 3: Did that's amazing, completely by accident the Penroses. That would
Speaker 3: be great, mathemagician.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I bet that's something four right.
Speaker 3: But the Penroses apparently wrote they saw some of Esher's work,
Speaker 3: wrote a paper explaining his work about impossible things like
Speaker 3: impossible stairs, which came to be called Penrose stairs. And
Speaker 3: Esher was either mailed a copy of this or somebody
Speaker 3: pointed out to him. So he created something called house
Speaker 3: of stairs or upstairs downstairs, one of the two, and
Speaker 3: sent one of the original prints to the Penroses. So,
Speaker 3: in a way, their correspondence and inspiration for one another
Speaker 3: was like a set of impossible stairs in real life.
Speaker 2: That interesting.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And this is you know, we were talking earlier
Speaker 1: about how his works somehow felt unsettling, and you know
Speaker 1: the subject matter as well. When you think about these
Speaker 1: the subjects walking in relativity, clearly never getting anywhere, walking
Speaker 1: downstairs sideways, all of a sudden, I'm walking back into
Speaker 1: the same staircase I was just on. Like you imagine,
Speaker 1: if these things were to come alive, they would be frustrated,
Speaker 1: angry people.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 3: And as a matter of fact, one of the one
Speaker 3: that you're just talking about upstairs downstairs, they that was
Speaker 3: supposedly based on some a staircase in his school. Oh really,
Speaker 3: which suddenly says quite a bit about his psychology, don't
Speaker 3: you think?
Speaker 1: Well? How so?
Speaker 2: Well?
Speaker 3: I mean, like, these students aren't going anywhere, they're not
Speaker 3: even human. There's centipedes with human faces, gotcha, gotcha.
Speaker 2: And they're kind of trapped in this well.
Speaker 3: You could definitely call like a a purposeless existence in
Speaker 3: this building. It's kind of a dark building.
Speaker 1: Interesting. So he does finally achieve really great fame later
Speaker 1: in his life. Like you said, he was holding exhibitions
Speaker 1: in the Netherlands and a little bit in Europe, but
Speaker 1: he did one in Belgium in nineteen fifty. That led
Speaker 1: to an article in The Studio, which was an art magazine,
Speaker 1: and that captured the attention of a journalist who wrote
Speaker 1: about him in Time and Life magazines, which definitely propped
Speaker 1: him up a little bit.
Speaker 2: Yo.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Then that led to a larger exhibition at the
Speaker 1: International Mathematical Congress in fifty four. Flash forward to sixty six,
Speaker 1: he was featured in Mathematical Games Column and Scientific American
Speaker 1: by Martin Gardner mathemagician, I guarantee you that's a thing.
Speaker 1: And that increased his And this was sixty six, so
Speaker 1: it was kind of perfect timing with the hippies and
Speaker 1: the drugs and the counterculture. And I guess who was
Speaker 1: at Graham.
Speaker 3: Nash Graham Nash Mick Jagger sent him a fan ladder
Speaker 3: and made the mistake of calling him by his first name.
Speaker 3: Oh really, Jessher did not appreciate Stanley Kubrick tried to
Speaker 3: recruit him to make two thousand and one in Space Odyssey,
Speaker 3: a fourth dimensional film.
Speaker 1: Huh.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: There's this interesting article called the Impossible World of mc
Speaker 3: Escher that Stephen Poole wrote in The Guardian that has
Speaker 3: a lot of that stuff in it. But he was
Speaker 3: kind of like, no, I'm good over here with my
Speaker 3: mathematician friends.
Speaker 1: Well, once he was featured in Scientific American, that led
Speaker 1: to the big daddy of them all. He got featured
Speaker 1: in Rolling Stone, and then after that it was all over.
Speaker 2: He was huge, Yeah, dorm room huge.
Speaker 1: Four hundred and forty eight works. Then this doesn't count
Speaker 1: all the sketches and drafts. These are like the actual
Speaker 1: final works, right, And like we said earlier, he dies
Speaker 1: nineteen seventy two of cancer the age of seventy three.
Speaker 1: And I tried to find more about his family, but
Speaker 1: there's not a lot out there, like his sons and
Speaker 1: whether or not his I mean, I guess his grandkids
Speaker 1: would be contemporaries of ours.
Speaker 3: Yep, I don't know, Like he was born in eighteen
Speaker 3: ninety nine, Well, great grandkids maybe.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Okay, I guess if his kids were born in
Speaker 1: the nineteen twenties, Yeah, contemporaries of our parents maybe.
Speaker 2: Sure. The old stirs Yeah boomers.
Speaker 1: Hey, boomer, Boomer. Okay, boom hey boomer. So get that right.
Speaker 3: In that Journey to Infinity movie, apparently all three of
Speaker 3: his children appear in it.
Speaker 2: Oh really, if you want to know more about them,
Speaker 2: go watch that.
Speaker 1: I saw one picture of him where he looked a
Speaker 1: lot like our old colleague John Fuller when John had
Speaker 1: a beard.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah he did, didn't It looked a little bit
Speaker 3: like him. Yeah, it's not expecting that, nop. So there's
Speaker 3: mc es sure, that's right. Speaking of not expecting that,
Speaker 3: Babe on Corvette Sure and Hooters air Line made appearances
Speaker 3: in the mcs. You're I just want to point out
Speaker 3: if you want to know more about any of those things,
Speaker 3: go on to the internet and start searching. And since
Speaker 3: I said that, it's time for listener mail.
Speaker 1: Hey guys, I've been listening to your show since twenty eleven.
Speaker 1: I even seeing you. I've even seen you on your
Speaker 1: first amazing show in Chicago and had to wait a
Speaker 1: whole year to hear that on the podcast. Oh yeah,
Speaker 1: that's how it works.
Speaker 3: Sure, Sorry, it's not even guaranteed that it's going to
Speaker 3: be the show you saw.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: A lot of podcasts put out just tons and tons
Speaker 1: of live shows. We don't do that. No, Yeah, and
Speaker 1: I honestly think the live shows are a little better
Speaker 1: in person. I don't think they make as a fan
Speaker 1: of other podcasts, I don't think they make for the
Speaker 1: best just regular content.
Speaker 2: I think most people think.
Speaker 1: That, but we just so. That's why we only put
Speaker 1: out the one, right, So back to the letter, This
Speaker 1: show is so great I would even save high interest
Speaker 1: episodes for my son to listen to over the years. Nice,
Speaker 1: you were one of the few people that can keep
Speaker 1: his attention. I never thought I would write, but as
Speaker 1: a science teacher, you said something recently that's so true.
Speaker 1: Some of the best science websites are children's science websites.
Speaker 1: Or if a definition is too difficult, I always tell
Speaker 1: people to look up a child's definition for that word.
Speaker 1: Really good tip, guys. Thanks for sharing that. Thanks for
Speaker 1: all your work, and now I will have to figure
Speaker 1: out what to do now that I am finally caught up.
Speaker 1: Keep up the great work. And that is from Jenny
Speaker 1: with an Eye.
Speaker 2: Thanks Jenny with an Eye.
Speaker 3: Hopefully you dot the I with the heart, maybe with
Speaker 3: a little reflection on the side of the heart. You
Speaker 3: remember that one two curve lines top with topped and
Speaker 3: I guess bottomed with.
Speaker 2: A straight line.
Speaker 1: I think I know what you're talking about, Caro.
Speaker 2: I'll show you.
Speaker 1: Oh boy, since we just dis oh oh sure that yeah, yeah.
Speaker 3: It almost looks like a bent Roman numeral to inside
Speaker 3: the heart. That's the reflection of light. That's where the
Speaker 3: light's coming from.
Speaker 1: It's beautiful.
Speaker 2: Thanks to Escher reference.
Speaker 1: I'll treasure that.
Speaker 2: You're welcome check. I wasn't going to give it to you,
Speaker 2: but now.
Speaker 1: I have to just sign it first.
Speaker 3: If you want to get in touch with us, you
Speaker 3: can go on to stuff you should know dot com
Speaker 3: and look for our social links there. And you can
Speaker 3: also send us an email like Jenny with and I did.
Speaker 3: You can send it to.
Speaker 2: Stuff podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.
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