I probably have more works by MC Escher in my house than any other artist. Some people might get snobbish about that because he’s quite mainstream, but art appreciation isn’t a competition and you don’t lose points for admiring well-known pieces.

In fact, that’s one of the things I love about Escher’s works - nobody needs a fine art degree to appreciate what’s clever about them. From the most refined critic to someone who just wants something cool on a T-shirt, absolutely anyone can “get” what makes an Escher captivating.

At the same time, however, every Escher piece is a baffling puzzle which the viewer must try to solve. In that sense, his work puts everyone on the same playing field - we’re all looking at it wondering “How does that work? What’s the trick?” Escher’s pieces are therefore simultaneously accessible to everyone, while also being universally confounding - a total paradox - just like the works themselves.

Aesthetically I’m a huge fan of monochromatic art and since Escher often created lithographs, much of his pieces use a simple black and white palette. This lack of color strips every distraction away so it becomes entirely about shapes, symmetries, angles and perspectives. There’s nothing to distract the eye so the clever illusions are immediately obvious.

His work also represents a harmony between artistic playfulness and mathematical precision. As someone who trained as an IT tech (and has an obsession with astronomy) I often wish the arts and sciences would get along better. There’s a perceived schism between the two cultures, but I’d like to think most of us are somewhere in the middle...which is precisely where Escher’s work belongs.

The son of an engineer, and an architectural student in college, Escher had a lot of STEM influences growing up, but the thing which fascinated him the most was mathematics.

He never considered himself a mathematician but regularly corresponded with some of the most famous numerical minds of the 20th century, including Nobel-laureate Sir Roger Penrose. The symbiotic admiration between these two was so strong, in fact, that Escher’s famous Ascending and Descending was actually inspired by Penrose’ own sketch Penrose Stairs, which was itself inspired by an Escher gallery that Penrose had visited!

The geometrical inventiveness of Escher’s drawings were even used as a jumping-off point for theoretical physicist Leonard Susskind, who took Circle Limit IV as his inspiration when exploring the nature of Lobachevsky geometry in string theory (which I’m obviously an expert on, since you ask).

Sadly, Escher didn’t get a huge amount of popularity among the artistic community during his lifetime because his work was seen as more of a curiosity rather than a true artistic expression, but his technical skill with perspective is, I would argue, without compare.

So to anyone who says his work isn’t fancy or ‘high-brow’ enough, I say: go take a walk around Escher’s staircase - I’ll talk to you when you reach the top...

M.C. Escher

Marcus Rothkowitz

Keith haring