Biography ofMC Escher and his link with tessalations

Presentation about M.C Escher

Today we’re going to talk about M.C Escher and his work. For that we will starts with a biography of this artist then we will speak about two examples of his tessellations and symmetries that we have found in them.

BIOGRAPHY:

First, Maurits Cornelis Escher was born on the 17th June 1898 in Netherland more precisely in Leeuwarden. He was a Dutch artist famous for his wood engravings, his mezzotints and his lithographs sometimes inspired by mathematics and his friend the British physician and mathematician Roger Penrose. His art was inscribed in pop art, surrealism, expressionism, realism, cubism, modern art or northern rebirth.

He is the son of George Arnold Escher a Dutch civil engineer and his second wife Sara Adriana Gleichman. He had only a big brother, Berend George Escher a pioneer in experimental geology and his brother had some influence on him because of his knowledge of crystallography. To thank him of that, M.C created a woodcut with a stylized image of a volcano.

He married his wife the Italian Jetta Umiker in 1923 and they had 3 children Giorgio, Arthur and Jan who are still alive today.

During his career, M.C Escher has done a lot of creation in different styles like “Penrose triangle”, “The house of stairs” or “The impossible cube” which are impossible situation or objects. Metamorphoses like “Day & Night” or “Sky & Water” where a form is repeated a lot of times and little by little this form is transformed in another one. Tessellations are a form of metamorphoses but there’s no transformation. We will see some examples in the second part of the presentation. And finally, he did a lot of lithographs and I think that the most famous of them is “Drawing Hands” where we can see each hand drawing the other one.

He died the 27th March 1972 in Laren in Netherland but his art is staying famous in the whole world since.

HOW MANY SYMMETRIES CAN YOU THINK FOR THE PICTURES YOU FOUND?

I have chosen “Flying Fish”. In this Tessellation we can see red and white fishes which looked like birds. On this picture we can count 22 white birds and 23 red. They are in groups of 3 red and 3 white who are gathering in a circle. On a pattern we can found about 3 axis of symmetries which aren’t straight lines but curves.

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