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Selects: MC Escher and His Trippy Art · Stuff You Should Know

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: Hi, everybody. Chuck here on a Saturday. I'm just sitting
• 0:03
  Speaker 1: here drawing cubes and things with my poor artwork. But
• 0:08
  Speaker 1: you know who was really good at this? Mc Esher
• 0:10
  Speaker 1: And this episode from December twenty nineteen gets all into
• 0:13
  Speaker 1: the life of the great artist. And the title is
• 0:16
  Speaker 1: mc esher and his Trippy Art. I hope you enjoy it.
• 0:24
  Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
• 0:33
  Speaker 2: Hey, and welcome to the podcast.
• 0:35
  Speaker 3: I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W Chuck Bryant, and
• 0:37
  Speaker 3: there's Jerry over there, and this is Stuff you Should Know.
• 0:40
  Speaker 2: The Arts Sea.
• 0:42
  Speaker 1: Edition is Jerry Roomtone. Roland.
• 0:45
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I think that's make believe stuff.
• 0:49
  Speaker 1: Room tone.
• 0:49
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 0:50
  Speaker 3: She might as well be like, let me capture a
• 0:51
  Speaker 3: few fairies in this, Mason jow First.
• 0:54
  Speaker 2: I think it's the same thing.
• 0:55
  Speaker 1: We may need us in the final edit. Perry, I
• 0:59
  Speaker 1: don't know what it is about to explain to everyone.
• 1:01
  Speaker 1: Room tone is you do this on film sets and
• 1:03
  Speaker 1: in studios where you just make everyone sit completely silently
• 1:08
  Speaker 1: while you capture the sound of the room. So I
• 1:10
  Speaker 1: guess you can. What do you do with that, Joe?
• 1:12
  Speaker 1: Do you layer it in in case you need it
• 1:14
  Speaker 1: or something. Did you hear that? Everyone?
• 1:16
  Speaker 3: She said, she cleans up the background to everybody listening.
• 1:20
  Speaker 3: It sounded like.
• 1:23
  Speaker 1: There's something about it. Though. It's like being in church
• 1:25
  Speaker 1: and getting the giggles. Like it's really hard, especially on
• 1:28
  Speaker 1: a film set when there's like fifty people standing around
• 1:31
  Speaker 1: being completely silent.
• 1:32
  Speaker 3: I suspect it's strictly a power trip, you think, So
• 1:35
  Speaker 3: the person calling for a room tone, that's what I think.
• 1:38
  Speaker 1: I'm going to start doing that my house when things
• 1:40
  Speaker 1: get out of hand room tone?
• 1:42
  Speaker 2: Do you think that works?
• 1:43
  Speaker 3: Don't make me bust out the room tone on you? Well,
• 1:46
  Speaker 3: since this no, no, I was going to say, since
• 1:49
  Speaker 3: we're talking about room tone, obviously, the topic today is
• 1:53
  Speaker 3: mc escher, who is well known for going berserk anytime
• 1:56
  Speaker 3: someone asked him to be quiet for room tone, trash chairs,
• 2:02
  Speaker 3: grab reptiles straight out of the two dimensions and throw
• 2:05
  Speaker 3: them into the third dimension, just do all sorts of weird.
• 2:07
  Speaker 1: Stuff that's funny.
• 2:09
  Speaker 2: Did you think so that was a joke just for you?
• 2:12
  Speaker 1: Yeah? So he everyone knows mc es or. If you've
• 2:14
  Speaker 1: ever been to college or taken drugs.
• 2:18
  Speaker 2: Or sold drugs to somebody in college.
• 2:21
  Speaker 1: Then you've probably seen hands drawing hands or I mean,
• 2:26
  Speaker 1: that's not what the name of that one.
• 2:27
  Speaker 2: Was, but it's called drawing hands, oh is it?
• 2:30
  Speaker 1: Or the Some of his more famous ones are the
• 2:33
  Speaker 1: these impossible rooms like stairs that lead to sideway stairs
• 2:38
  Speaker 1: but you got to wrap your head around it in
• 2:40
  Speaker 1: a certain way to even make sense of it, all.
• 2:42
  Speaker 3: Right, or stairs that lead into other stairs that lead
• 2:45
  Speaker 3: back into the other stairs.
• 2:46
  Speaker 2: Sure this is constant.
• 2:48
  Speaker 1: Or I'm a big fan of that one self portrait
• 2:50
  Speaker 1: he did in the with the sphere. Yeah, the mirror sphere,
• 2:54
  Speaker 1: mirror sphere.
• 2:54
  Speaker 2: Yeah, it's cool, it is very cool.
• 2:56
  Speaker 3: I'm not crazy about the face, even though I'm sure
• 2:59
  Speaker 3: he did it exactly precise, but the hand, if you
• 3:02
  Speaker 3: look at the hand, it's really realistic.
• 3:05
  Speaker 2: It's very pretty.
• 3:06
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean I like this stuff. This is not
• 3:07
  Speaker 1: my style, as in anything I would put on my
• 3:10
  Speaker 1: walls these days, but I still think he's one of
• 3:14
  Speaker 1: the coolest, more innovative artists out there.
• 3:18
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 3:18
  Speaker 1: And there's a great factoid that I hope will hold
• 3:21
  Speaker 1: till the end, which not the end but kind of
• 3:24
  Speaker 1: where it falls in our So what an outline?
• 3:27
  Speaker 3: What does factoid mean against I mean you've killed ten
• 3:29
  Speaker 3: percent of all the facts, that's right, and this is
• 3:31
  Speaker 3: just one of the ten percent remaining.
• 3:33
  Speaker 1: That's right.
• 3:33
  Speaker 2: Okay, gotcha. So one of the things you chuck about MC.
• 3:39
  Speaker 3: I sure that I found was that if you were
• 3:41
  Speaker 3: impressed by his work, prepared to get exponentially more impressed
• 3:45
  Speaker 3: as we talk about how he made those works. Well too,
• 3:48
  Speaker 3: that's the fact of the show too for me. Oh okay,
• 3:50
  Speaker 3: that's the factoid you.
• 3:51
  Speaker 1: Yeah, you got a hold onto that.
• 3:52
  Speaker 3: Oh sure, sure, sure sure. I was just teasing it
• 3:55
  Speaker 3: a little bit. I didn't know that's what you're talking about,
• 3:57
  Speaker 3: although I should have guessed. Yeah. So this is a
• 4:00
  Speaker 3: talking about an artist, which means that we should probably
• 4:02
  Speaker 3: talk about the artist being born. And in the case
• 4:06
  Speaker 3: of MC Escher, whose name, by the way, was Moritz Cornelis,
• 4:14
  Speaker 3: I want to say Cornelius, but there's no U in there.
• 4:16
  Speaker 1: I think Cornelis.
• 4:17
  Speaker 3: Sure Esher, I nailed the last nurme. That's right, But
• 4:22
  Speaker 3: I misspoke on name.
• 4:24
  Speaker 1: Oh you didn't say the name nrme.
• 4:27
  Speaker 2: So I nailed the last nurme.
• 4:29
  Speaker 3: This is the point where the people say, get to
• 4:31
  Speaker 3: the point already.
• 4:32
  Speaker 1: Well we are at that point. That's MC and then
• 4:36
  Speaker 1: Esher born June seventeenth, eighteen ninety eight, not nineteen eighty nine,
• 4:42
  Speaker 1: as the Grabster put it. Yeah, it was like, man,
• 4:45
  Speaker 1: he's like, here's the numbers. He was born in leu Warden, Netherlands,
• 4:51
  Speaker 1: grew up in Arnheim, which is about sixty miles southeast
• 4:55
  Speaker 1: of Amsterdam.
• 4:56
  Speaker 2: Is that right?
• 4:57
  Speaker 1: Yeah? Okay, I mapped all this stuff out nice, kind
• 5:00
  Speaker 1: of that general area.
• 5:01
  Speaker 2: He went on a little Google tour.
• 5:03
  Speaker 1: Sure, and he signed even from early on as MCE
• 5:08
  Speaker 1: he signed his paintings, although people called him mock m
• 5:12
  Speaker 1: a UK friends and family.
• 5:14
  Speaker 3: Right, which didn't mean anything, Ed points out. But it's
• 5:17
  Speaker 3: just like, you know, an affectionate term for Moritz. Yeah,
• 5:21
  Speaker 3: is it Mouritz?
• 5:23
  Speaker 1: Probably Maritz Maurites, cornelis Escher, but.
• 5:26
  Speaker 2: It could also go the way of Morris. So is
• 5:28
  Speaker 2: it Moritz or more?
• 5:30
  Speaker 1: I don't know.
• 5:31
  Speaker 2: I wish I knew.
• 5:33
  Speaker 1: Well. What we do know is that in this we
• 5:36
  Speaker 1: should put a pin in because it sort of plays
• 5:38
  Speaker 1: a big part in how he pursued his art. But
• 5:41
  Speaker 1: his dad had some money.
• 5:43
  Speaker 2: He was a rich kid, yeah for sure.
• 5:45
  Speaker 1: Which really helps. As we'll see as he's trapesing around Europe.
• 5:49
  Speaker 3: On dad's dime, slowly getting better at art slowly.
• 5:55
  Speaker 1: Yeah, that's a good point, because he was not great
• 5:58
  Speaker 1: in school. He did love drawing class, but apparently wasn't
• 6:03
  Speaker 1: you know, he didn't have his second grade teachers falling
• 6:06
  Speaker 1: over themselves about what a talented artist he was.
• 6:08
  Speaker 3: No, and apparently he also didn't consider himself much of
• 6:11
  Speaker 3: an artist, although he engaged in art like he did
• 6:15
  Speaker 3: produce art from a very young age. He was terrible
• 6:18
  Speaker 3: in school, except at math and at drawing. Apparently when
• 6:22
  Speaker 3: he was in grade school primary school he failed as finals,
• 6:26
  Speaker 3: all of them except for math. And I read that
• 6:28
  Speaker 3: his father noted in his journal with some affection that
• 6:32
  Speaker 3: his son consoled himself by producing a lina type of
• 6:37
  Speaker 3: a sunflower. That's how he made himself feel better after
• 6:41
  Speaker 3: failing out of school.
• 6:42
  Speaker 1: Well, and he was somewhat adept at math early on.
• 6:46
  Speaker 1: But it's interesting his work is highly mathematical as far
• 6:51
  Speaker 1: as art goes, but later on in life, when he
• 6:53
  Speaker 1: was confronted with real mathematicians, he would sort of be like, no,
• 6:58
  Speaker 1: not me, man, I'm an artist. Well, I'm not that
• 7:01
  Speaker 1: kind of mathematician.
• 7:02
  Speaker 3: So I said yes. But he was most of his
• 7:04
  Speaker 3: friends were mathematicians. For most of his career, he was
• 7:08
  Speaker 3: mostly appreciated by mathematicians and scientists. Those are the people
• 7:12
  Speaker 3: who really vibed on his work and drugs that came later.
• 7:17
  Speaker 3: That came later, and he got real popular. But I
• 7:20
  Speaker 3: saw that somebody made a movie called Journey into Infinity documentary,
• 7:25
  Speaker 3: full length documentary.
• 7:26
  Speaker 2: I believe the whole.
• 7:26
  Speaker 3: Thing's on YouTube, and it starts out.
• 7:30
  Speaker 2: The trailer starts out with.
• 7:31
  Speaker 3: Graham Nash saying, Hey, I called up mc esher one
• 7:35
  Speaker 3: day just to say, mister Esher, I think you're a
• 7:38
  Speaker 3: really great artist. That's all I wanted you to say.
• 7:41
  Speaker 3: And he said, I don't consider myself an artist. I
• 7:44
  Speaker 3: consider myself a mathematician. Oh really, yes, So I'm going
• 7:48
  Speaker 3: with Graham Nash's interpretation as counter to this spoke to
• 7:52
  Speaker 3: him directly.
• 7:52
  Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, I mean it's crazy. He I mean, not
• 7:56
  Speaker 1: to spoil anything, but he died in nineteen seventy two
• 8:00
  Speaker 1: at just seventy three. So you know, if he would
• 8:03
  Speaker 1: have lived to his like mid eighties, which is somewhat reasonable,
• 8:08
  Speaker 1: he would have been like alive in the eighties, which
• 8:10
  Speaker 1: just seems so weird.
• 8:11
  Speaker 3: It does seem kind of weird, you know, yeah, because
• 8:13
  Speaker 3: he was. He seems countercultural for sure, even though him
• 8:18
  Speaker 3: his personality was not very countercultural. No, and he didn't
• 8:22
  Speaker 3: really have much love for hippies. In fact, he later
• 8:25
  Speaker 3: said that the hippies in San Francisco are legally making
• 8:28
  Speaker 3: copies of my work. He didn't exactly follow, you know,
• 8:35
  Speaker 3: the normal usual beat throughout his lifetime. And he was
• 8:40
  Speaker 3: a mathematician. He was a bit of a square, but
• 8:42
  Speaker 3: he was also a very imaginative square.
• 8:44
  Speaker 1: That's right. I was trying to make a square joke,
• 8:48
  Speaker 1: but it's not coming to me.
• 8:50
  Speaker 2: Remember that show, Square peg, square peg, square, yeah, square peg.
• 8:54
  Speaker 3: Sarah Jesica Parker was she in that. She was also
• 8:57
  Speaker 3: in Girls Just Want to Have Fun, That's right.
• 9:00
  Speaker 1: Yeah, And I'm going to see her on Broadway next spring.
• 9:04
  Speaker 1: Really yeah. She and her husband are co starring in
• 9:07
  Speaker 1: Plaza Suite and Neil Simon's Plaza Sweet. Very nice, very
• 9:10
  Speaker 1: excited about that. But I'm trying to align it with
• 9:14
  Speaker 1: a Bonnie Prince Billy show. But they're like a week apart,
• 9:17
  Speaker 1: and I'm like, I can't just stay in New York.
• 9:19
  Speaker 3: Time to kill, especially when there's hourly flights between Atlanta
• 9:22
  Speaker 3: and New York.
• 9:23
  Speaker 1: I know, I may just go see Bonnie Prince Billy
• 9:25
  Speaker 1: and come home because he didn't play much. But that's
• 9:28
  Speaker 1: a story for another day, all right. So he goes
• 9:32
  Speaker 1: to school at Technical College of Delft, not for very long,
• 9:37
  Speaker 1: and then he went to the Harlem with two A's
• 9:41
  Speaker 1: School of Architecture and Decorative Arts, which is west of Amsterdam,
• 9:45
  Speaker 1: not Harlem, New York.
• 9:46
  Speaker 3: Well, I think that's what the Harlem, New York is
• 9:48
  Speaker 3: named after. Right, Yeah, that's where Bonnie Prince.
• 9:52
  Speaker 1: He's at town Hall.
• 9:53
  Speaker 2: Actually, Oh is that right? Yeah, we played there.
• 9:55
  Speaker 1: That's right. We got our stink on that joint. So
• 9:58
  Speaker 1: his dad said, you know, because you know, his dad
• 10:01
  Speaker 1: had a lot of money and made money, and even
• 10:03
  Speaker 1: though you want to support your kids, you want you
• 10:06
  Speaker 1: want to try and edge them into something. Sure, if
• 10:08
  Speaker 1: you're that kind of dude, that might be lucrative. So
• 10:11
  Speaker 1: he said, hey, you like to draw shapes, why don't
• 10:13
  Speaker 1: you go study architecture. And he did that for a
• 10:17
  Speaker 1: little while, even though he wasn't super into it. But
• 10:20
  Speaker 1: while at school there he had a very fortunate meeting
• 10:24
  Speaker 1: by being mentored by one Samuel Jasurin Demisquita m.
• 10:29
  Speaker 3: Who would be his mentor, who noticed some of his
• 10:32
  Speaker 3: early art. I'm not sure how he saw it, but
• 10:34
  Speaker 3: he took one look at Esher's art and said, you
• 10:37
  Speaker 3: don't need to go into architecture. Come study under me
• 10:40
  Speaker 3: and learn graphic design. And so Escher did. He became
• 10:43
  Speaker 3: a graphic designer, which he whether he knew it or not,
• 10:46
  Speaker 3: he had been his whole life up to that point.
• 10:49
  Speaker 3: All of his work is very graphic in nature and designing.
• 10:54
  Speaker 2: Yeah, it really really is.
• 10:55
  Speaker 1: But I'm sure his dad in the early, you know,
• 10:58
  Speaker 1: nineteen twenties was probably like, is that even a thing, right?
• 11:01
  Speaker 2: That sounds made up?
• 11:02
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 11:03
  Speaker 3: Well, his dad also, I don't know if you said
• 11:04
  Speaker 3: or not, was a civil engineer, so of course he
• 11:06
  Speaker 3: would be like, you draw, just go do architecture, right,
• 11:09
  Speaker 3: that's what I know, civil engineering, and there's architects in
• 11:12
  Speaker 3: the world. Just go do the other thing that I
• 11:14
  Speaker 3: don't do.
• 11:14
  Speaker 1: And he probably thought graphic design just meant like you're
• 11:17
  Speaker 1: gonna make signs.
• 11:19
  Speaker 3: Right or post his stamps or Christmas paper, which he
• 11:22
  Speaker 3: did later on.
• 11:22
  Speaker 1: That's right, until he made a little bit of dough.
• 11:25
  Speaker 1: So in the early nineteen twenties, he started on his
• 11:29
  Speaker 1: sort of rich kid journey, traveling around Europe on his
• 11:34
  Speaker 1: dad's dime.
• 11:35
  Speaker 2: On a gap year that was really really long.
• 11:37
  Speaker 1: Very long. But on one of these trips he went
• 11:41
  Speaker 1: to a couple of places that would end up having
• 11:43
  Speaker 1: a big influence on him. Yeah, one in Spain at
• 11:46
  Speaker 1: the Alhambra, and then just traveling through southern Italy through
• 11:50
  Speaker 1: the countryside.
• 11:51
  Speaker 2: Yeah, he just fell in love with Italy.
• 11:53
  Speaker 1: Yeah, but in Spain this is this is one that
• 11:55
  Speaker 1: didn't bear fruit right away, but he was really fascinated
• 11:59
  Speaker 1: by these mosaics and tesselations, which are described as.
• 12:06
  Speaker 3: Okay, they are repeating designs that interlock with one another,
• 12:11
  Speaker 3: leave no space between one another, and that when you
• 12:13
  Speaker 3: fit them together they fully cover a plane, which is
• 12:17
  Speaker 3: harder to do than you would think.
• 12:20
  Speaker 1: Yeah, Like, if you've ever seen the esher fish sort
• 12:24
  Speaker 1: of tesselation.
• 12:25
  Speaker 3: The whitefish and the blackfish kind of working in one another.
• 12:29
  Speaker 1: Yeah, that's a perfect example. And he would do this
• 12:31
  Speaker 1: a lot later on. If you've ever played Cubert, Yeah,
• 12:36
  Speaker 1: those cubes are tesselations, sure, a certain kind. But he
• 12:40
  Speaker 1: got really into this, even though it wasn't like right
• 12:43
  Speaker 1: away that he started doing these things that sort of
• 12:45
  Speaker 1: came a little bit later. But what he did do
• 12:48
  Speaker 1: was started drawing the Italian countryside because he loved it.
• 12:52
  Speaker 2: Loved it, I mean, like he went to Italy, he
• 12:54
  Speaker 2: was like, this is my home.
• 12:55
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 12:56
  Speaker 3: And he was quoted at one point in time as
• 12:58
  Speaker 3: saying like he never wanted to be an Italian among Italians.
• 13:02
  Speaker 3: He liked being a stranger, but he loved Italy, which.
• 13:06
  Speaker 1: Is an interesting thing to say. I'm not exactly sure
• 13:08
  Speaker 1: what it means.
• 13:08
  Speaker 3: I think what he was saying was he he likes
• 13:13
  Speaker 3: being a visitor to Italy rather than there's a certain
• 13:18
  Speaker 3: amount of responsibility that comes with being one of us,
• 13:21
  Speaker 3: you know what I mean. Whereas if you can be
• 13:23
  Speaker 3: like that guy over there, who will accept him. We're
• 13:25
  Speaker 3: not going to throw rocks at him every time we
• 13:27
  Speaker 3: see him or anything like that, and we'll take his
• 13:28
  Speaker 3: money and you know, maybe even say hi.
• 13:30
  Speaker 2: To him or whatever, but we'll leave him alone.
• 13:32
  Speaker 3: We won't include him in our expectations of what it
• 13:35
  Speaker 3: means to be a local. Gotcha, That's what I think
• 13:38
  Speaker 3: he was after. Clearly I can identify with that.
• 13:41
  Speaker 1: Well. That kind of came through in his work too,
• 13:43
  Speaker 1: because if you'll notice even in these, before he started
• 13:47
  Speaker 1: doing the like trippy three dimensional handstrawing hands and stuff,
• 13:51
  Speaker 1: when he was doing countrysides, he didn't do a lot
• 13:54
  Speaker 1: of people, didn't do a lot of faces. People were
• 13:57
  Speaker 1: very much in the background and nondescript. But even when
• 14:00
  Speaker 1: you look at these, when you say Italian still lives
• 14:03
  Speaker 1: of countrysides, what came to mind for me were these beautiful, lush,
• 14:08
  Speaker 1: colorful recreations of a countryside. Nope, Nope, when you look
• 14:12
  Speaker 1: at these, they still look very much like in the
• 14:14
  Speaker 1: mc escher style that we all know.
• 14:16
  Speaker 2: Yeah, like very clearly. A lot of love them too.
• 14:18
  Speaker 1: They're cool.
• 14:19
  Speaker 2: Yeah, they're beautiful.
• 14:20
  Speaker 3: Yeah, they're black and white and then shades of gray,
• 14:22
  Speaker 3: which is all just shading, right, Yeah, but they are
• 14:25
  Speaker 3: beautiful in their way and lovely.
• 14:27
  Speaker 1: Even I like this stuff more than the trippy stuff.
• 14:30
  Speaker 1: Oh yeah, yeah, I mean this is something I would
• 14:32
  Speaker 1: put on my wall.
• 14:33
  Speaker 3: You're an art snob, You're like, oh, I only like
• 14:35
  Speaker 3: Esher's early Italian landscapes.
• 14:39
  Speaker 2: Oh man, you take that, say the trippy stuff for
• 14:42
  Speaker 2: Graham Nash.
• 14:42
  Speaker 1: I'm so ashamed.
• 14:43
  Speaker 2: No, I think it's great, Chuck. You you have.
• 14:46
  Speaker 1: Totally right but they are gorgeous. And then in nineteen
• 14:52
  Speaker 1: twenty three he met his wife.
• 14:54
  Speaker 2: His name was Jetta jedda Umaker.
• 14:57
  Speaker 1: That's right, very nice, thank you.
• 14:58
  Speaker 2: She was learned from the.
• 15:01
  Speaker 1: They met her in Italy, but she was Swiss and
• 15:04
  Speaker 1: she went home and they sent a bunch of love letters.
• 15:06
  Speaker 1: It's a very sweet story. I'm sure an mcacsher movie
• 15:09
  Speaker 1: would be pretty cool.
• 15:11
  Speaker 3: Somebody wrote a script or they wrote a dissertation about
• 15:15
  Speaker 3: the process of writing a script about mc esher. It's
• 15:19
  Speaker 3: from University of Texas. I wrote it in twenty seventeen.
• 15:22
  Speaker 3: I can't remember the name of it. But just look up. Oh,
• 15:25
  Speaker 3: just some random stuff comes up if you look up
• 15:28
  Speaker 3: mosquito bootprint, which will come up later. But if you
• 15:32
  Speaker 3: search that on Google, it brings up Have you ever
• 15:35
  Speaker 3: done that? Have you ever been like, I'm bored. I
• 15:37
  Speaker 3: want to see what weird stuff I can unlock from Google.
• 15:40
  Speaker 3: And it takes a certain amount of skill because Google
• 15:43
  Speaker 3: wants to give you exactly what you're looking for. It
• 15:46
  Speaker 3: doesn't want to give you just randomness, so you have
• 15:49
  Speaker 3: to trick it. So maybe you'll you'll type in a
• 15:52
  Speaker 3: weird word or the first three letters of a word
• 15:55
  Speaker 3: or something like that, and weird stuff will start to come.
• 15:58
  Speaker 3: Well if you type in mosquito. Probably only like the
• 16:01
  Speaker 3: first three of them pertained to m cescher and the
• 16:03
  Speaker 3: rest are just a random assortment of links.
• 16:07
  Speaker 1: I remember, early in the days of Google, we had
• 16:11
  Speaker 1: a mutual friend who they did this what I thought
• 16:15
  Speaker 1: was a very dumb game where they would try and
• 16:17
  Speaker 1: find two words together that they would try and produce
• 16:21
  Speaker 1: the fewest amount of Google results. And whoever could put
• 16:24
  Speaker 1: two words together that found the fewest one. Yeah, And
• 16:27
  Speaker 1: I don't know if you remember them doing that, but
• 16:28
  Speaker 1: so I don't know. I don't remember you talking about
• 16:30
  Speaker 1: lost a waste of time.
• 16:31
  Speaker 2: But I remember that some guy did, like a ted
• 16:33
  Speaker 2: talk about that.
• 16:34
  Speaker 1: Oh really yeah, Oh well, maybe I'm the dummy.
• 16:36
  Speaker 2: No, no, no, it was.
• 16:38
  Speaker 1: I mean, look at me. I'd like mcsher's early work.
• 16:42
  Speaker 2: I think that's awesome. I mean, what taste. Yeah, you know.
• 16:46
  Speaker 1: So he meets and gets married. She returns to Italy
• 16:51
  Speaker 1: and they married nineteen twenty four.
• 16:52
  Speaker 2: Do you mean Jeda Umaker.
• 16:54
  Speaker 1: That's right. She would become Jeda Esher.
• 16:57
  Speaker 2: Jeda Umiker Esher, and.
• 16:59
  Speaker 1: They had a son named Georgio. Later had sons, Arthur
• 17:03
  Speaker 1: and Jan and uh, they were still just sort of
• 17:07
  Speaker 1: traveling and his dad was even though he was married,
• 17:09
  Speaker 1: his dad was still footing the bill.
• 17:12
  Speaker 3: Esher's dad father, Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, which I was just
• 17:16
  Speaker 3: thinking about it. I was like, gosh, you know, I
• 17:19
  Speaker 3: get a benefactor. Wake up every day and look at
• 17:21
  Speaker 3: yourself in the mirror.
• 17:22
  Speaker 1: But if you're if you're in the mirror sphere.
• 17:25
  Speaker 2: Right, how do you and then how do you draw it?
• 17:27
  Speaker 1: Yeah?
• 17:28
  Speaker 3: So amazingly the the father Esher's father though, and like,
• 17:33
  Speaker 3: what better way to spend your money than to just
• 17:35
  Speaker 3: be like, this is what you want to do with
• 17:37
  Speaker 3: your life, son, you want to pursue art and live
• 17:39
  Speaker 3: in beautiful Italy than like here, this is what I
• 17:42
  Speaker 3: want for you.
• 17:43
  Speaker 1: And that's like, that's awesome.
• 17:46
  Speaker 3: That's the pinnacle of what a parent can do for
• 17:48
  Speaker 3: their child in a lot of ways.
• 17:50
  Speaker 1: No, totally know.
• 17:51
  Speaker 3: It's not like, hey, why don't you go, you know,
• 17:53
  Speaker 3: take up Heroin and here's a bunch of money for
• 17:55
  Speaker 3: you to like lay around in a BEFA.
• 17:57
  Speaker 1: True I want to know more. I'm not I hope
• 18:00
  Speaker 1: I'm not coming across his cynical but I wonder if
• 18:02
  Speaker 1: some of this was like, he'll come around if I
• 18:06
  Speaker 1: you know, to architecture or whatever.
• 18:08
  Speaker 3: Right, you kept waiting for the part where his father
• 18:10
  Speaker 3: cuts him off. I was his father apparently wouldn't like that.
• 18:14
  Speaker 3: All right, I know how you feel. I'm not trying
• 18:16
  Speaker 3: to talk you into my way of thinking. I'm not
• 18:18
  Speaker 3: saying like I had. I started out thinking the same
• 18:20
  Speaker 3: way you did. And then something happened. I was like, Oh,
• 18:22
  Speaker 3: it was actually really neat of his dad.
• 18:24
  Speaker 1: It was it all seems above board. Yeah. So World
• 18:27
  Speaker 1: War Two has a profound effect on Esher and his work.
• 18:31
  Speaker 1: In nineteen thirty five, he learned that they were making
• 18:35
  Speaker 1: his nine year old son, Georgio, marching fascist youth parades,
• 18:40
  Speaker 1: and he said, pack your bags, we're going to Switzerland.
• 18:43
  Speaker 3: That is the appropriate response to that news. Yeah, we're
• 18:46
  Speaker 3: getting out of here marching for Mussolini.
• 18:49
  Speaker 1: Have you seen Jojo Rabbit yet?
• 18:52
  Speaker 2: No? Is it good? Is it as good as it looks?
• 18:54
  Speaker 1: It's great?
• 18:55
  Speaker 2: Oh, I can't wait.
• 18:56
  Speaker 1: It's great. Everything about it is created.
• 18:58
  Speaker 2: I need to see it in theater. It doesn't like
• 19:00
  Speaker 2: one I have to see any No.
• 19:01
  Speaker 1: I mean, you know, it's always fun to laugh with
• 19:03
  Speaker 1: a big group of people, although by now it's probably
• 19:05
  Speaker 1: thinned out. Yeah, and I was laughing a lot and
• 19:08
  Speaker 1: people weren't laughing. Oh, I like that kind of one
• 19:10
  Speaker 1: of those deals. Yeah, I mean, it's a movie about
• 19:13
  Speaker 1: a kid having Hitler as an imaginary friend.
• 19:15
  Speaker 2: So don't tell me that I didn't know. I know,
• 19:18
  Speaker 2: I had no idea Itler's on the poster. I know,
• 19:21
  Speaker 2: but I didn't know he was an imaginary friend. Oh,
• 19:24
  Speaker 2: get out of my brain.
• 19:25
  Speaker 1: Sorry, that really doesn't spoil anything.
• 19:27
  Speaker 2: Okay, like, don't tell me any not some big reveal.
• 19:31
  Speaker 1: So they go to Switzerland. All apologies, it's really not a.
• 19:35
  Speaker 2: Big deal as long as it's not a big spoiler.
• 19:37
  Speaker 1: No, no, no, no, of course not.
• 19:38
  Speaker 2: Okay.
• 19:39
  Speaker 1: They go to Switzerland and he even though he did
• 19:42
  Speaker 1: not like the mountains, he didn't like the snow, did
• 19:45
  Speaker 1: not like cold weather. So they moved to Belgium after
• 19:49
  Speaker 1: a couple of years.
• 19:50
  Speaker 2: Which is just beautiful compared to Switzerland.
• 19:53
  Speaker 1: Belgium's nice sure in the nineteen In May of nineteen forty, though,
• 19:58
  Speaker 1: the Nazzis invaded Belgium, and so they moved to the
• 20:02
  Speaker 1: Netherlands in nineteen forty one.
• 20:03
  Speaker 3: Where the Nazis already were. Yeah, I guess they really
• 20:07
  Speaker 3: can't occupy it again.
• 20:09
  Speaker 1: Well in its home right, and they settled in Barn,
• 20:13
  Speaker 1: which is about twenty three miles southeast of Amsterdam.
• 20:16
  Speaker 2: I don't know if that's how you're supposed to say it.
• 20:18
  Speaker 1: B aa aaar inn, I like it's probably Barn.
• 20:25
  Speaker 2: Oh yeah, I'll bet you just nailed it.
• 20:27
  Speaker 1: I think so. But Dutchess very strange. It is language,
• 20:30
  Speaker 1: but it's supposed that's strange. But just for my English,
• 20:33
  Speaker 1: dumb English.
• 20:33
  Speaker 2: Years, supposedly English is the strangest of all.
• 20:36
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I'm sure it's just.
• 20:37
  Speaker 2: A hybrid mongrel language.
• 20:40
  Speaker 3: Yet that doesn't make any sense to anyone who's not
• 20:42
  Speaker 3: a native speaker of it.
• 20:44
  Speaker 1: You know, what is an interesting language is Welsh. Because
• 20:47
  Speaker 1: I'm watching the Crown and when Prince Charles starts coming around,
• 20:51
  Speaker 1: Prince of Wales, there's people speaking Welsh. And I was
• 20:54
  Speaker 1: very ignorant about even knowing that what it sounds like,
• 20:57
  Speaker 1: what it sounds like, and that it was still spoken,
• 21:00
  Speaker 1: and it was a very odd hybrid. It sounded like
• 21:03
  Speaker 1: of several different things.
• 21:05
  Speaker 2: It's all old Celtic stuff.
• 21:06
  Speaker 1: Yeah, very unusual.
• 21:08
  Speaker 3: Gallic, gallic, Yeah, I think it's Gallic. It's the language group,
• 21:12
  Speaker 3: one of the two.
• 21:13
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 21:13
  Speaker 3: Everything I know about Welsh I learned from super furry animals.
• 21:17
  Speaker 2: Oh yeah, because that guy's welsh Man.
• 21:19
  Speaker 1: I saw them blood granddaddy off the stage one time.
• 21:22
  Speaker 2: Oh you saw him live?
• 21:24
  Speaker 1: Oh I think you told me that he melted. My
• 21:25
  Speaker 1: brain was so good all that. So they're traveling around still,
• 21:30
  Speaker 1: even though they're settled in Barn, and they go back
• 21:34
  Speaker 1: to al Hambra in Spain, which I don't think we
• 21:37
  Speaker 1: said what that is.
• 21:38
  Speaker 3: No, it's a thirteenth century Moorish castle from when the
• 21:41
  Speaker 3: Moors conquered Spain.
• 21:43
  Speaker 1: It's beautiful.
• 21:43
  Speaker 2: It is very beautiful, and they.
• 21:45
  Speaker 3: Built it in the Moorish style and then it was
• 21:47
  Speaker 3: eventually like taken over by the Christian like royalty that
• 21:51
  Speaker 3: explored the New World and all that stuff. Yeah, but
• 21:54
  Speaker 3: this castle was done in these tiles that are noun
• 22:00
  Speaker 3: for being some of the most beautiful geometric like Islamic
• 22:05
  Speaker 3: patterns you've ever seen in your life. And they got
• 22:09
  Speaker 3: to esher. He'd seen him before, but it was I
• 22:11
  Speaker 3: guess he was like, oh, that's kind of cool. But
• 22:13
  Speaker 3: the second trip that he went back with after they
• 22:16
  Speaker 3: moved from Switzerland. I think to Belgium or maybe to Switzerland.
• 22:21
  Speaker 3: That's when he was like, I am obsessed with these
• 22:23
  Speaker 3: Now these tessellations.
• 22:25
  Speaker 1: Started drawing him. Jetted it too. It says that they
• 22:29
  Speaker 1: worked together. So I didn't know that she was an artist.
• 22:32
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I didn't either.
• 22:34
  Speaker 1: But they World War two comes back around, will not
• 22:38
  Speaker 1: comes back around. It never left, let's be honest. But
• 22:42
  Speaker 1: Spain would devolve into civil war. And so this meant
• 22:46
  Speaker 1: that he was kind of stuck in outside of Amsterdam
• 22:51
  Speaker 1: for a little while longer. Yeah, he wasn't doing as
• 22:53
  Speaker 1: much traveling.
• 22:53
  Speaker 3: No, he was in the Netherlands and he rekindled his
• 22:58
  Speaker 3: friendship with Mosquita, his old mentor who had stayed in
• 23:04
  Speaker 3: Netherlands this whole time. And Mosquita was Jewish and he
• 23:10
  Speaker 3: was taken away by the Nazis. Eventually he was killed
• 23:14
  Speaker 3: at Auschwitz, I believe, with his wife and their son
• 23:19
  Speaker 3: was also killed at another concentration camp by the Nazis.
• 23:22
  Speaker 3: And this really got to esher, like, this is one
• 23:26
  Speaker 3: of his dear friends. And he had a work a
• 23:29
  Speaker 3: sketch of Mosquitos. When he went to his house to
• 23:32
  Speaker 3: visit Mosquito, he found the door was opened and they
• 23:34
  Speaker 3: weren't there, and they'd clearly been taken by the Nazis.
• 23:37
  Speaker 3: And one of the pieces of artwork that he gathered
• 23:40
  Speaker 3: together to preserve was a sketch of mosquitos that had
• 23:42
  Speaker 3: a Nazi bootprint on it.
• 23:44
  Speaker 1: And that's what you were referenced earlier with your.
• 23:46
  Speaker 2: Google search mosquito bootprint.
• 23:48
  Speaker 1: Did you Was there a picture of it?
• 23:49
  Speaker 2: No?
• 23:50
  Speaker 3: I couldn't find anything aside from the fact that it
• 23:52
  Speaker 3: was a sketch, not that it was a sketch of
• 23:53
  Speaker 3: what or anything like that, just that there was a
• 23:56
  Speaker 3: sketch of mosquitos that had boor bootprint, and the Escher
• 24:01
  Speaker 3: hung onto this his his entire life. It was very
• 24:04
  Speaker 3: important to him.
• 24:05
  Speaker 2: And he was not.
• 24:10
  Speaker 3: A very flowery, like like passionate man or anything like that.
• 24:17
  Speaker 3: I get the impression that he and this is esture
• 24:19
  Speaker 3: I'm talking about, that he internalized a lot of stuff,
• 24:23
  Speaker 3: and I think that him holding on to that piece
• 24:25
  Speaker 3: of art was probably more significant than even it appears
• 24:30
  Speaker 3: on the outside.
• 24:31
  Speaker 1: Yeah, and supposedly hid some people from a Jewish family
• 24:37
  Speaker 1: during the Nazi occupation years, and also during those same years,
• 24:41
  Speaker 1: did not exhibit or release any prints.
• 24:43
  Speaker 3: Wait a minute, I think you just said hid some
• 24:45
  Speaker 3: people from a Jewish family, or did you say hid
• 24:48
  Speaker 3: some members of a Jewish family.
• 24:50
  Speaker 1: Well, people members of a Jewish family.
• 24:52
  Speaker 2: But you said from I think yeah.
• 24:54
  Speaker 1: I mean like they were from a Jewish family.
• 24:56
  Speaker 2: Oh oh, gotcha, gotcha, gotcha.
• 24:58
  Speaker 1: He didn't hide them from right, don't.
• 25:01
  Speaker 2: Tell the Jewish family that you're hiding over here.
• 25:03
  Speaker 1: No, that would have been weird. So maybe we should
• 25:07
  Speaker 1: take a break now.
• 25:08
  Speaker 2: Oh, I think it's unraveled for the point the guys
• 25:11
  Speaker 2: are yeah.
• 25:11
  Speaker 3: All right, okay, Chuck. So World War two kind of
• 25:36
  Speaker 3: comes and goes around esher despite his best efforts to
• 25:39
  Speaker 3: escape it, and it definitely had a mark on him.
• 25:43
  Speaker 3: But one of the other things that that had a
• 25:46
  Speaker 3: really big mark on him was having to move from
• 25:49
  Speaker 3: Italy because, like you said, like he was married, had
• 25:52
  Speaker 3: a family, his father was still supporting him, and every
• 25:55
  Speaker 3: spring and summer he would just tour the Italian countryside
• 25:57
  Speaker 3: and visit small quaint towns be inspired to keep making
• 26:01
  Speaker 3: these Italian landscapes. But Ed makes a really great point
• 26:04
  Speaker 3: here that his Italian landscapes are very handsome works of art,
• 26:08
  Speaker 3: very beautiful, my favorite, technically proficient. They're Chuck's favorite. But
• 26:12
  Speaker 3: you would almost certainly have never seen them in your
• 26:15
  Speaker 3: entire life now were it not for him moving from Italy,
• 26:20
  Speaker 3: because in doing so he lost his source of inspiration
• 26:23
  Speaker 3: and was forced to kind of turn inward because he
• 26:25
  Speaker 3: hated what Switzerland looked like. He wasn't apparently very inspired
• 26:29
  Speaker 3: by his home country of the Netherlands, so he had
• 26:33
  Speaker 3: to kind of turn inward into his own imagination and
• 26:35
  Speaker 3: start coming up with new subjects, and in doing that,
• 26:39
  Speaker 3: the true Escher was unlocked.
• 26:42
  Speaker 1: Yeah, because early and like a lot of artists early
• 26:45
  Speaker 1: in their career, they kind of free ranged through different styles,
• 26:50
  Speaker 1: trying to find their own personal thing.
• 26:52
  Speaker 3: He had a very very colorful clown period. It's very bizarre.
• 26:56
  Speaker 3: Doesn't fit with the rest of it.
• 26:58
  Speaker 1: Arry, John Wayne Gacy, You're right, but you can very
• 27:02
  Speaker 1: clearly see if you look at Mosquito's work that connection
• 27:05
  Speaker 1: and the influence from him. Although Mosquita did a lot
• 27:09
  Speaker 1: of sort of graphic portraits and things like that, whereas
• 27:13
  Speaker 1: Esher didn't really worry too much about humans and faces.
• 27:16
  Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, they were just kind of like almost afterthoughts.
• 27:20
  Speaker 1: But early on he did start experimenting with stuff that
• 27:23
  Speaker 1: would later become sort of his hallmark. When he did
• 27:26
  Speaker 1: do a sketch of a building, let's say it would
• 27:31
  Speaker 1: be from this really like tall odd angle looking down
• 27:35
  Speaker 1: on it, very severe angles and like a horizon, or
• 27:41
  Speaker 1: trees that sort of go on into infinity. Stuff like that,
• 27:44
  Speaker 1: that would become very much his style. Later on, and
• 27:47
  Speaker 1: ed Various Stuteley points out that there's something about his
• 27:50
  Speaker 1: style that I don't know how dark of a person
• 27:54
  Speaker 1: he was emotionally, but there is something about the severity
• 27:58
  Speaker 1: of these angles and a lot of his work that
• 28:01
  Speaker 1: was just sort of uneasy feeling, right. It didn't look
• 28:06
  Speaker 1: like just some beautiful, colorful Italian countryside. There was something
• 28:11
  Speaker 1: kind of strange and unusual about it.
• 28:14
  Speaker 3: Something about the contrast of black and white definitely does
• 28:18
  Speaker 3: it too. And he was such a master of shading
• 28:21
  Speaker 3: that if something was stark and black and white, I mean,
• 28:24
  Speaker 3: unless it was his earliest work, was because he wanted
• 28:27
  Speaker 3: it to look that way and to make it stark
• 28:29
  Speaker 3: and kind of unsettling like that. But yeah, there's like
• 28:32
  Speaker 3: a certain amount of dread in a lot of his stuff. Yeah,
• 28:36
  Speaker 3: and it's not something you can easily put your finger on,
• 28:38
  Speaker 3: but it's definitely there.
• 28:40
  Speaker 1: Yeah, like did you see the mummified priests? Yeah, that
• 28:45
  Speaker 1: was creepy and then one of them.
• 28:47
  Speaker 2: Isn't it more creepy to actually do that in real
• 28:49
  Speaker 2: life to stand them up like that? And these little alcoves?
• 28:54
  Speaker 1: Oh? Yeah, absolutely sure.
• 28:55
  Speaker 2: He was just don't kill the messenger.
• 28:58
  Speaker 1: And he would have sometimes skulls featured in some of
• 29:02
  Speaker 1: his work and stuff like that, like the one of
• 29:04
  Speaker 1: the eye believe called eye right in the middle of
• 29:08
  Speaker 1: the people is a skull staring back. So he had
• 29:10
  Speaker 1: little touches like that without going full like you know,
• 29:15
  Speaker 1: love Craftian.
• 29:16
  Speaker 2: Right or Goya or something like that.
• 29:18
  Speaker 1: And I don't even know, Bosh, I don't know who
• 29:20
  Speaker 1: that is.
• 29:21
  Speaker 2: Sure you do, I'm just kidding, Okay, I know those people. Okay, So.
• 29:27
  Speaker 1: His I guess this is where we get to the
• 29:29
  Speaker 1: fact of the show for me. Take it away, Chuck,
• 29:31
  Speaker 1: because folks, if you've ever seen an mcsher print and
• 29:36
  Speaker 1: you thought, man, that guy could sure draw a print,
• 29:39
  Speaker 1: imagine cutting that out of wood in reverse, in reverse.
• 29:44
  Speaker 3: Because that's what he did. A lot of his stuff
• 29:46
  Speaker 3: were wood cuts. Even harder than that, Chuck, is the lithograph.
• 29:51
  Speaker 1: Yeah, so a woodcut if you've ever made used a
• 29:55
  Speaker 1: stamp or made a potato stamp as your kid.
• 29:58
  Speaker 2: You're basically.
• 30:00
  Speaker 1: Well, that's what it is. He's actually carving the stuff
• 30:02
  Speaker 1: into wood as a negative image, because then when you
• 30:05
  Speaker 1: run ink over it and stamp it, you get the
• 30:07
  Speaker 1: positive image. And it's just incredible. I mean, it's hard
• 30:11
  Speaker 1: enough to draw and sketch this stuff, much less cut
• 30:14
  Speaker 1: it out of wood.
• 30:15
  Speaker 3: Right, So just take a step back and think about
• 30:17
  Speaker 3: the eshers that you've seen before. Imagine that they were
• 30:21
  Speaker 3: originally carved out of wood, and now imagine that to
• 30:25
  Speaker 3: get even more detailing. Because you can't adjust how much
• 30:28
  Speaker 3: ink a certain part of the woodblock gets. It's all
• 30:31
  Speaker 3: going to get an even layer of ink. So to
• 30:34
  Speaker 3: shade something you have to do cross hatching, lines, stippling
• 30:37
  Speaker 3: something like that. But to get really detailed with shading,
• 30:41
  Speaker 3: you need multiple blocks of the same image in the
• 30:45
  Speaker 3: exact same size, with different parts accentuated so that you
• 30:50
  Speaker 3: can layer over. You can take the same paper and
• 30:53
  Speaker 3: layer them on different blocks and line them up so
• 30:56
  Speaker 3: that you have layers to this image. That was the
• 31:00
  Speaker 3: level of the woodcuts this guy was doing.
• 31:03
  Speaker 1: Yeah, like that's sort of like a T shirt hippie exactly.
• 31:07
  Speaker 1: Screen printing, like a four color shirt. You gotta layer,
• 31:10
  Speaker 1: you gotta put it on exactly in the in the
• 31:12
  Speaker 1: spot that it needs to go each time drag that
• 31:15
  Speaker 1: inc across so it's not you know, off by a
• 31:18
  Speaker 1: centimeter right, because it would look bad.
• 31:21
  Speaker 3: So the woodcuts, especially as earlier woodcuts, you can tell
• 31:25
  Speaker 3: their woodcuts.
• 31:26
  Speaker 2: They look like woodcuts. Some of them do not.
• 31:29
  Speaker 3: There's some of the Italian countryside that favorites are just yeah,
• 31:34
  Speaker 3: are just astounding. And when you stop and think about
• 31:37
  Speaker 3: the idea that they there's not a drawing that there
• 31:40
  Speaker 3: wood cuts, multiple blocked woodcuts, is pretty astounding. But like
• 31:45
  Speaker 3: I was saying to me, even even more difficult is
• 31:48
  Speaker 3: making the lithograph. Yeah.
• 31:51
  Speaker 1: I think I talked about this on some other episode.
• 31:55
  Speaker 1: I know it talked about batikuing, but I also talked
• 31:57
  Speaker 1: to in industrial arts. We did of lithography in that
• 32:01
  Speaker 1: social experiment high school. Yeah, exactly, we did offset lithography,
• 32:06
  Speaker 1: which basically, I mean that's the process today. I mean,
• 32:10
  Speaker 1: that's how they make newspapers, posters, books, maps, kind of
• 32:13
  Speaker 1: everything is with offset lithography.
• 32:16
  Speaker 3: It was in do you remember it was in the
• 32:20
  Speaker 3: etch A sketch episode. Oh that's what Ohio Art originally
• 32:23
  Speaker 3: did was lithography.
• 32:24
  Speaker 1: Okay, well this is this is pre like today, use
• 32:29
  Speaker 1: like aluminum or some other kind of metal sheet and
• 32:32
  Speaker 1: these emulsions and chemicals. Back then it was drawn onto limestone,
• 32:39
  Speaker 1: a flat slab of limestone with a grease pencil, and
• 32:42
  Speaker 1: then use a chemical treatment on the areas that basically
• 32:47
  Speaker 1: water and ink don't mix. It's sort of all built
• 32:49
  Speaker 1: on that principle. So the areas where you have written
• 32:53
  Speaker 1: in Greece do not hold that ink or is it
• 32:56
  Speaker 1: the other way around?
• 32:57
  Speaker 2: No, I think they don't hold the a.
• 32:59
  Speaker 1: Yeah. Again, what you're doing is creating a negative image,
• 33:01
  Speaker 1: just like the woodcut essentially.
• 33:03
  Speaker 3: Right, So you've got this attraction and repulsion interplay between ink,
• 33:10
  Speaker 3: water and grease, and when you put it all together
• 33:15
  Speaker 3: on limestone, it makes these extremely subtle gradients of shading
• 33:23
  Speaker 3: that are kind of like a hallmark of some of
• 33:26
  Speaker 3: Esher's more well known works. Yeah, the hands drawing hands, right, Yeah,
• 33:34
  Speaker 3: that was a lithograph. He made that with limestone and
• 33:36
  Speaker 3: grease pen and ink, and did it in reverse too,
• 33:40
  Speaker 3: because just like with a woodblock, you have to create
• 33:42
  Speaker 3: the negative of it, Yah, because you want the positive
• 33:46
  Speaker 3: image on the paper.
• 33:47
  Speaker 1: You have a very special brain if this is if
• 33:49
  Speaker 1: you can work this stuff out as an artist. Yes,
• 33:51
  Speaker 1: you know, it's not saying that any kind of artist
• 33:56
  Speaker 1: is any better or worse or smarter than the next.
• 34:00
  Speaker 1: But your brain just has to be wired a little
• 34:02
  Speaker 1: bit differently to thinking negatives.
• 34:04
  Speaker 3: Like that, like a mathematician. Basically, yeah, your brain has
• 34:07
  Speaker 3: to be set up that way.
• 34:08
  Speaker 1: Yeah, absolutely, But lithography is difficult, very labor intensive. So
• 34:14
  Speaker 1: later on he would hire a lithographer to actually create
• 34:17
  Speaker 1: his prints after he's sketched and drawn the stuff out.
• 34:20
  Speaker 1: Smart move, And he would destroy the limestone. Well, he
• 34:23
  Speaker 1: wouldn't destroy it, he would scrape it clean so we
• 34:25
  Speaker 1: could reuse it. So that's the reason. Like if you
• 34:28
  Speaker 1: want to buy an original mc escher, good luck.
• 34:32
  Speaker 3: Well there's no such thing. There's original prints that he made,
• 34:35
  Speaker 3: right And apparently you're.
• 34:36
  Speaker 1: Not going to get your hands one of those limestones.
• 34:38
  Speaker 3: No, but there are a couple of those left over.
• 34:41
  Speaker 3: But he said that he wanted him. I think canceled
• 34:44
  Speaker 3: is what they call it in his will right where
• 34:46
  Speaker 3: they intentionally damage it so that even if you got
• 34:50
  Speaker 3: a hold of one of these things, and you were like, I'm.
• 34:52
  Speaker 2: Going to print me a brain new Esher.
• 34:54
  Speaker 3: There'd be like the like the negative image of Snegel
• 34:58
  Speaker 3: Puss like comes through the hand drawing hands picture.
• 35:03
  Speaker 1: And he did not do many original prints from those
• 35:06
  Speaker 1: original woodcuts and lithographs either. I think he only did
• 35:09
  Speaker 1: ten of still life with spherical mirror, and so anything, obviously,
• 35:15
  Speaker 1: anything you'd buy in a Spencer Gifts is going to
• 35:18
  Speaker 1: be a print anyway.
• 35:19
  Speaker 2: What they told me it was an original.
• 35:23
  Speaker 1: You mean bikini lady on Corvette.
• 35:26
  Speaker 2: You can probably get the original of that at Spencer.
• 35:28
  Speaker 1: Probably could the original negative.
• 35:31
  Speaker 2: Bikini lady on Corvette. Man remember that Starfield with Lamborghini.
• 35:37
  Speaker 1: These lithographs, he would also layer those just like you
• 35:40
  Speaker 1: did with the woodcuts, creating multiple plates to layer on
• 35:44
  Speaker 1: top of one another for shading and toning and stuff
• 35:46
  Speaker 1: like that. It's just amazing. I mean I did it
• 35:49
  Speaker 1: to make a Monkey's T shirt.
• 35:51
  Speaker 2: I forgot used to screenprint too, so did.
• 35:53
  Speaker 1: I Yeah, yeah, well actually the Monkeys T shirt was
• 35:57
  Speaker 1: screen printing. I think can remember what I did for
• 36:00
  Speaker 1: a lithograph. I think something to make a notepad that
• 36:02
  Speaker 1: said like my name and something else.
• 36:05
  Speaker 3: Oh that's right. So you you screenprinted in industrial arts? Yes, okay,
• 36:10
  Speaker 3: like you were you ever employed gainfully as a screen Oh? No?
• 36:14
  Speaker 2: Oh no?
• 36:14
  Speaker 1: Did you do that?
• 36:15
  Speaker 2: Yeah?
• 36:15
  Speaker 1: No, I mean I would have loved to it. I
• 36:17
  Speaker 1: wasn't good enough.
• 36:18
  Speaker 2: It's always not hard.
• 36:19
  Speaker 1: Yeah, but you would draw the stuff or you would.
• 36:21
  Speaker 3: No, no, no, no, I would like burn the screens and
• 36:25
  Speaker 3: everything and drag the ink through.
• 36:27
  Speaker 1: And you do that for a job, sure, well like
• 36:30
  Speaker 1: high school?
• 36:30
  Speaker 2: No, this is is college.
• 36:32
  Speaker 1: What kind of dough do you make doing that?
• 36:34
  Speaker 2: Jack?
• 36:35
  Speaker 1: Yeah?
• 36:35
  Speaker 2: But it's fun. It's cool work, you know, you just
• 36:37
  Speaker 2: listening to be in a few bucks pretty much hang
• 36:41
  Speaker 2: out with some cool dudes, and you know's.
• 36:43
  Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, I gotcha.
• 36:44
  Speaker 2: It's a good, good early college job, you know what
• 36:47
  Speaker 2: I mean.
• 36:47
  Speaker 1: I think it'd be cool. And I mean there's a
• 36:50
  Speaker 1: very cool T shirt local T shirt shop here that
• 36:52
  Speaker 1: every time I go over there because that's where our friend, uh,
• 36:55
  Speaker 1: the patchmaker, Katie Culp works, or at least she used
• 36:59
  Speaker 1: to think she's got her own space now, but she
• 37:01
  Speaker 1: shared a space with T shirt dudes. And anytime I'm
• 37:05
  Speaker 1: in there, it's just a good vibe, you know what
• 37:06
  Speaker 1: I mean, It really is there a lot worse places
• 37:09
  Speaker 1: to spend your time than a T shirt shop? So oh,
• 37:14
  Speaker 1: another thing we should point out is that he did
• 37:16
  Speaker 1: do color occasionally, but color was a hole different. You
• 37:19
  Speaker 1: had to do a separate stone for each color. So
• 37:22
  Speaker 1: that's why a lot of his stuff ended up in
• 37:24
  Speaker 1: black and white, aside from the fact that he liked
• 37:26
  Speaker 1: it as well.
• 37:26
  Speaker 2: Yeah, he seemed to be very pleased with black and
• 37:28
  Speaker 2: white in general.
• 37:29
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I'm not saying he was lazy.
• 37:31
  Speaker 3: No, but let's take a step back here for a
• 37:33
  Speaker 3: second and examine the idea that you thought mc yesher
• 37:37
  Speaker 3: was a pretty amazing artist when you just imagined that
• 37:40
  Speaker 3: he was sitting in his studio drawing all of this
• 37:43
  Speaker 3: stuff with a pencil. Now, really let it sink in
• 37:46
  Speaker 3: that he carved these things in reverse out of wood
• 37:50
  Speaker 3: or limestone or limestone and then use these crazy techniques
• 37:54
  Speaker 3: to make these extraordinarily detailed, incredibly precise and technical works
• 38:01
  Speaker 3: of art.
• 38:02
  Speaker 1: It's amazing. It really is amazing, truly astounding. And like
• 38:05
  Speaker 1: you said, there are a few of those stones and
• 38:08
  Speaker 1: woodblocks that are owned by the mc escher Foundation.
• 38:11
  Speaker 2: Snago puts on every single one of them.
• 38:13
  Speaker 1: And apparently they will display them occasionally along with his works.
• 38:17
  Speaker 3: Right, which I imagine seeing that and then looking at the
• 38:21
  Speaker 3: work of art, and then going back and looking at
• 38:23
  Speaker 3: that limestone and then looking at the work of art.
• 38:25
  Speaker 3: It really kind of sinks in, like, oh my.
• 38:28
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I'd love to see an exhibition of his stuff.
• 38:30
  Speaker 2: Me too. They've picked up in recent years, have they.
• 38:34
  Speaker 1: Yeah, it seems like he's being more appreciated as a
• 38:37
  Speaker 1: truly great artist and less college dorm wall material.
• 38:41
  Speaker 2: Yeap.
• 38:42
  Speaker 3: In twenty eleven, the record for highest overall attendance in
• 38:46
  Speaker 3: the world out of all the museums in the world
• 38:49
  Speaker 3: that year was at the Centro Cultural Banco to Brazil,
• 38:53
  Speaker 3: which held their Magical World of Escher exhibit. Oh wow,
• 38:56
  Speaker 3: five hundred and seventy thousand visitors about ten thousand a day.
• 39:01
  Speaker 1: Holy cow.
• 39:02
  Speaker 2: Yep.
• 39:02
  Speaker 1: So if you think lithography and woodcutting sounds difficult, we'll
• 39:07
  Speaker 1: talk a minute about mesotint. That is sort of like woodcutting,
• 39:13
  Speaker 1: except you're using a sheet of copper that starts out
• 39:16
  Speaker 1: as a rough surface and then use these little tools
• 39:20
  Speaker 1: to smooth out things that are going to be the image,
• 39:23
  Speaker 1: applying that ink and then wiping it off.
• 39:25
  Speaker 3: Right, So the places you smooth out are don't have ink.
• 39:29
  Speaker 3: The ones that are going to be white on the
• 39:31
  Speaker 3: paper are blank on the paper. Right, it's the rough
• 39:34
  Speaker 3: edges that hold the ink. So you cover the whole
• 39:37
  Speaker 3: thing with ink, wipe it down. The smooth start parts
• 39:41
  Speaker 3: come clean. The rough stuff has the ink, and you
• 39:46
  Speaker 3: can use this like this is this isn't like, oh
• 39:48
  Speaker 3: look I'm made an X, right, this is like incredibly
• 39:53
  Speaker 3: fine stippling is possible with these copper plates and all
• 39:58
  Speaker 3: this mezotint And that I that you were talking about
• 40:02
  Speaker 3: with the skull. If you go back and look at that,
• 40:04
  Speaker 3: that was a mezzo tint.
• 40:05
  Speaker 1: Yes, it was de drop, very detailed cupped leaf showing
• 40:10
  Speaker 1: a single drop of dew inside it, with all kinds
• 40:12
  Speaker 1: of cool reflections. But Escher called this the black art.
• 40:16
  Speaker 1: He only made eight of these because it is a
• 40:19
  Speaker 1: real undertaking, and I think he's just he did a
• 40:24
  Speaker 1: handful of him and then moved on to the far
• 40:26
  Speaker 1: easier wood cutting.
• 40:27
  Speaker 2: Right right, He's like, oh, I came back, baby.
• 40:32
  Speaker 1: All right, We'll take a break and then we'll come
• 40:35
  Speaker 1: back and pick up with his life story again, which
• 40:38
  Speaker 1: is I believeably left off in what end of world
• 40:40
  Speaker 1: War two sounds right, all right, Okay, world War Two
• 41:06
  Speaker 1: is over. Mc esher was, like a lot of people,
• 41:11
  Speaker 1: very rattled by that experience in Europe. And at this
• 41:15
  Speaker 1: point he's still is not a super famous artist making
• 41:19
  Speaker 1: tons of money.
• 41:20
  Speaker 3: No, but he's more famous than this makes him out
• 41:23
  Speaker 3: to be. Like, yeah, he's got some renown in the Netherlands,
• 41:27
  Speaker 3: there's certain circles of bits. Yeah, but he's not anywhere
• 41:31
  Speaker 3: anywhere even approaching how he is today or how he
• 41:34
  Speaker 3: has been the last few decades, since about like the
• 41:36
  Speaker 3: late sixties.
• 41:37
  Speaker 1: Yeah, college dorms have not yet started putting his stuff everywhere.
• 41:40
  Speaker 3: No, but the people who who most appreciate what he's
• 41:44
  Speaker 3: doing are scientists and mathematicians who are like, this is astounding.
• 41:48
  Speaker 3: This guy is taking what we write out as formulas
• 41:52
  Speaker 3: and turning them into art and making them precise. Yeah,
• 41:55
  Speaker 3: like you could describe this work of art as a formula.
• 41:59
  Speaker 3: That is what mc esher was able to do. He
• 42:02
  Speaker 3: was able to take math and translate it into a
• 42:04
  Speaker 3: visual art.
• 42:05
  Speaker 1: Yeah. And you know, remember what you said earlier, This
• 42:08
  Speaker 1: is where we are in his life. Where he is
• 42:11
  Speaker 1: he is not in the Italian countryside.
• 42:13
  Speaker 2: He's been ripped from its bodice, So.
• 42:15
  Speaker 1: His muse is gone and he is now looking inward
• 42:17
  Speaker 1: for his inspiration in his own unique brain.
• 42:21
  Speaker 2: He's being forced into his own bodice. Face first.
• 42:25
  Speaker 1: This is where he starts with these tessellations, more elaborate
• 42:28
  Speaker 1: geometric shapes. He's doing the lizards and the birds and
• 42:32
  Speaker 1: the insects. His tessellations, really really cool stuff. His brother said, hey, dude,
• 42:38
  Speaker 1: you know what you should do is go talk to
• 42:40
  Speaker 1: a crystallographer. He's like, if you want to talk detailed
• 42:42
  Speaker 1: shapes in maths, And he does so, and that taught
• 42:46
  Speaker 1: him a lot. And then he learned about the seventeen
• 42:49
  Speaker 1: wallpaper groups, which is so dense that I, you know,
• 42:54
  Speaker 1: how much do we even want to talk about it?
• 42:56
  Speaker 2: Well, we'll just sum it up.
• 42:58
  Speaker 3: The seventeen wallpaper groups basically is a mathematical concept that
• 43:01
  Speaker 3: says every geometric pattern two dimensional geometric pattern falls into
• 43:07
  Speaker 3: one of seventeen categories. There's only seventeen, and they're called,
• 43:10
  Speaker 3: kind of half jokingly, the wallpaper groups because wallpaper has
• 43:13
  Speaker 3: geometric patterns. I usually right, Escher couldn't understand it mathematically.
• 43:20
  Speaker 1: Yeah, it was proved out twice independently that there are
• 43:24
  Speaker 1: seventeen wallpapers the mathematical proof.
• 43:26
  Speaker 3: One of the things that's interesting, Chuck, is the Alhambra
• 43:29
  Speaker 3: apparently is the only place in the world that contains
• 43:33
  Speaker 3: all seventeen geometric wallpaper.
• 43:36
  Speaker 1: Patterns within its walls. That's pretty cool.
• 43:38
  Speaker 3: Yeah, so of course this would appeal to Esher, But
• 43:41
  Speaker 3: he didn't understand. He couldn't sit down and explain, like,
• 43:44
  Speaker 3: we can't what the seventeen wallpaper groups are or what
• 43:48
  Speaker 3: they mean mathematically, but he understood them intuitively, and as
• 43:52
  Speaker 3: he became friends with mathematicians know about mid career, he
• 43:59
  Speaker 3: was apparently kind of amused to find like, you know,
• 44:01
  Speaker 3: these guys spend all this time writing this stuff out
• 44:04
  Speaker 3: in these formulas, and I just know it. It was
• 44:06
  Speaker 3: almost like I was born knowing it. Yeah, you know,
• 44:09
  Speaker 3: I mean, I guess he was real cocky. Yeah, he
• 44:12
  Speaker 3: wasn't really just kidding.
• 44:13
  Speaker 1: And I didn't get the idea either that he was
• 44:15
  Speaker 1: like take your math and shove it. He was just
• 44:18
  Speaker 1: a little more amused that, like, you've got these mathematical
• 44:21
  Speaker 1: proofs that like, I'm drawing this stuff from my creative
• 44:26
  Speaker 1: brain on limestone on limestone, cutting it out of wood.
• 44:31
  Speaker 1: So I think he appreciated the way they coalesced. But
• 44:35
  Speaker 1: and he was very like you said, most of his
• 44:37
  Speaker 1: friends were mathematicians I think later in life. Who did
• 44:40
  Speaker 1: he have Penroses? Yeah, Roger and Lionel Pinrose, which I
• 44:44
  Speaker 1: love how it's described here, father and son mathematician team. Yeah, yeah,
• 44:50
  Speaker 1: you know those.
• 44:51
  Speaker 3: They were matching dolphin shorts, oh man, part of their uniform.
• 44:56
  Speaker 1: I wish people still wore those. Yeah, did you ever
• 44:58
  Speaker 1: wear those?
• 44:59
  Speaker 2: No, we were a little before my time.
• 45:01
  Speaker 1: Well, they were for joggers and runners.
• 45:04
  Speaker 3: Yeah, and it twenty eleven and who do I forgot
• 45:09
  Speaker 3: about that?
• 45:10
  Speaker 2: Yeah? That is what Hooters waitresses.
• 45:11
  Speaker 1: Orange shorts with remember bronze panny house.
• 45:15
  Speaker 2: There Yeah, and then chunky white socks.
• 45:17
  Speaker 1: Yeah, and it was a very back high tops.
• 45:18
  Speaker 2: It was bizarre.
• 45:19
  Speaker 1: Interesting.
• 45:20
  Speaker 3: Look somebody put that together and not a woman. Do
• 45:24
  Speaker 3: you remember there was a there was a Hooters airline
• 45:27
  Speaker 3: what yeah, wow.
• 45:29
  Speaker 1: That kind of rings a bell. Yeah. That was very
• 45:31
  Speaker 1: short lived, I imagine.
• 45:32
  Speaker 2: I believe, so it was pretty short lived.
• 45:35
  Speaker 1: Interesting, I guess. Yeah, so you would get asked like
• 45:37
  Speaker 1: what kind of drink and what style of chicken wing
• 45:41
  Speaker 1: do you want to get?
• 45:42
  Speaker 3: They did serve chicken wings on those of course, but
• 45:44
  Speaker 3: can you imagine being on an airplane being forced to
• 45:47
  Speaker 3: smell chicken wings the whole time if you didn't like it.
• 45:49
  Speaker 1: Uh, that's like every flight I ever take. It's true,
• 45:52
  Speaker 1: there's somebody with some stinky food.
• 45:54
  Speaker 3: You know. If I sit next to somebody on the
• 45:56
  Speaker 3: plane and I'm going to eat, I ask them if
• 45:58
  Speaker 3: it's okay if I eat.
• 46:00
  Speaker 1: Like if you bring food on yep. I don't bring
• 46:03
  Speaker 1: food onto.
• 46:03
  Speaker 2: A flight sometimes, dude, you just have to. Yeah, it's
• 46:06
  Speaker 2: a long flight.
• 46:07
  Speaker 3: And sure, I'm not going to run out of turkey
• 46:09
  Speaker 3: wraps like in the first half a second.
• 46:11
  Speaker 1: So you just pull out your what my kung pow
• 46:14
  Speaker 1: out of your pocket you had just in case they're
• 46:16
  Speaker 1: out of turkey wraps?
• 46:17
  Speaker 2: Yea, not even in the containers, just in my pocket.
• 46:20
  Speaker 1: Oh goodness. So I thought this part was sort of
• 46:24
  Speaker 1: amusing how orderly he always was with his art, and
• 46:28
  Speaker 1: he tried to get into chaos a bit in this
• 46:33
  Speaker 1: one work contrast parentheses Order and chaos parentheses, wherein he
• 46:38
  Speaker 1: went and dug up a bunch of trash and said
• 46:42
  Speaker 1: I will draw chaos, and it ended up being if
• 46:46
  Speaker 1: you go and look at it. There's like a broken bottle,
• 46:48
  Speaker 1: broken eggshell, an open sardine tin and broken clay pipe
• 46:51
  Speaker 1: and some other refuse drawn to like perfect or I
• 46:55
  Speaker 1: guess woodcutter lithographed with perfect, beautiful precision.
• 46:59
  Speaker 2: Right was chaos his interpretation of it.
• 47:02
  Speaker 1: He just couldn't do it.
• 47:02
  Speaker 3: He was very much preoccupied with Kassi. He has a
• 47:05
  Speaker 3: very famous quote, probably his most famous quat quote, we
• 47:08
  Speaker 3: adore chaos because we'd love to produce order. And he's like,
• 47:12
  Speaker 3: by we, I mean me, Yeah.
• 47:14
  Speaker 1: Sure, sounded very much like an eye statement.
• 47:17
  Speaker 3: But he was very much into geometry and precision and
• 47:21
  Speaker 3: clean lines and all that.
• 47:22
  Speaker 1: Yeah. And also as his career would progress, this this
• 47:26
  Speaker 1: these repeating patterns on a finite space. If you've seen
• 47:32
  Speaker 1: his circle limit series, that's where you'll find the fish
• 47:35
  Speaker 1: or these demons. And they start out with like one
• 47:38
  Speaker 1: in the center, and then there's a pattern all around,
• 47:41
  Speaker 1: and as it gets closer and close to the edge,
• 47:42
  Speaker 1: they get smaller and smaller and smaller, and you can
• 47:45
  Speaker 1: just sort of imagine that there is no end to
• 47:48
  Speaker 1: these shapes.
• 47:49
  Speaker 3: That they're just going infinitely around the sphere. Yeah, perfectly,
• 47:52
  Speaker 3: but again you have to stop and remind yourself this
• 47:54
  Speaker 3: is a two dimensional image I'm looking at right, and
• 47:56
  Speaker 3: then secondly.
• 47:57
  Speaker 2: This is cut out of wood.
• 48:00
  Speaker 3: But yeah, he apparently made a three dimensional wood carving
• 48:04
  Speaker 3: of his circle limits series later on in life. And
• 48:06
  Speaker 3: I'll bet that's spectacular to see too. He made it,
• 48:09
  Speaker 3: what a three dimensional wood carving of it, basically proving
• 48:12
  Speaker 3: that his two dimensional drawing was accurate. Yeah, because he
• 48:16
  Speaker 3: made it in the three dimensions, that's awesome.
• 48:19
  Speaker 2: Yeah, he was just showing off towards the end there.
• 48:23
  Speaker 1: I like reptiles that's going aside from his early countryside
• 48:26
  Speaker 1: work that is far superior. The tessellation of the lizards
• 48:31
  Speaker 1: and reptiles is really neat. That's the one that has
• 48:33
  Speaker 1: the lizards being like crawling off of the page as
• 48:38
  Speaker 1: a drawn image, circling around, walking over some books, and
• 48:42
  Speaker 1: then crawling back over onto the page as a drawn image. Yeah,
• 48:46
  Speaker 1: very neat.
• 48:46
  Speaker 3: It's a lot like the hands drawing or drawing hands
• 48:51
  Speaker 3: one kind of where the hands are drawing themselves or
• 48:54
  Speaker 3: one another, but they're also three dimensional two and that
• 48:57
  Speaker 3: actually kind of jobs with another quote he had then,
• 49:01
  Speaker 3: I think really sums that style of art up. He said,
• 49:04
  Speaker 3: the flat shape irritates me. I feel as if I
• 49:07
  Speaker 3: were shouting to my figures, you are too fictitious for me.
• 49:11
  Speaker 3: You just lie there, static and frozen together. Do something.
• 49:15
  Speaker 3: Come out of there and show me what you are
• 49:17
  Speaker 3: capable of. And he would shout it just like that.
• 49:20
  Speaker 1: And then Jetta would back out of the room slowly. Okay, dear,
• 49:23
  Speaker 1: here's your t Yeah. And that sort of brings us too.
• 49:26
  Speaker 1: With the reptiles. We need to talk a little bit
• 49:29
  Speaker 1: about illusion because it started sort of early on. He
• 49:34
  Speaker 1: was preoccupied with illusion, whether it was like these lizards
• 49:38
  Speaker 1: coming off the page or still Life in Street, which
• 49:42
  Speaker 1: is a tabletop that blends into a street scene.
• 49:45
  Speaker 2: That's a neat one.
• 49:45
  Speaker 1: Yeah, it's really cool. I like that one too, or relativity,
• 49:49
  Speaker 1: which I don't know. I mean, is there a most
• 49:52
  Speaker 1: famous maybe hands?
• 49:53
  Speaker 3: It's between hands self portrait with sphere and relativity.
• 49:57
  Speaker 1: Yeah. Relativity is the one with the staircases.
• 49:59
  Speaker 3: Yeah, people going up and downstairs that don't go anywhere,
• 50:03
  Speaker 3: but they go everywhere and they circle back on each
• 50:05
  Speaker 3: other and it's just an impossible staircase actually called Penrose Stairs.
• 50:09
  Speaker 1: Oh really.
• 50:10
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 50:10
  Speaker 1: After the famous father and son mathemagician.
• 50:13
  Speaker 2: Team and speaking of the Penrose as they did.
• 50:16
  Speaker 1: I'd just say, mathemagician, I just invented something I.
• 50:19
  Speaker 3: Did that's amazing, completely by accident the Penroses. That would
• 50:24
  Speaker 3: be great, mathemagician.
• 50:25
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I bet that's something four right.
• 50:31
  Speaker 3: But the Penroses apparently wrote they saw some of Esher's work,
• 50:35
  Speaker 3: wrote a paper explaining his work about impossible things like
• 50:39
  Speaker 3: impossible stairs, which came to be called Penrose stairs. And
• 50:44
  Speaker 3: Esher was either mailed a copy of this or somebody
• 50:47
  Speaker 3: pointed out to him. So he created something called house
• 50:50
  Speaker 3: of stairs or upstairs downstairs, one of the two, and
• 50:54
  Speaker 3: sent one of the original prints to the Penroses. So,
• 50:57
  Speaker 3: in a way, their correspondence and inspiration for one another
• 51:01
  Speaker 3: was like a set of impossible stairs in real life.
• 51:04
  Speaker 2: That interesting.
• 51:05
  Speaker 1: Yeah, And this is you know, we were talking earlier
• 51:08
  Speaker 1: about how his works somehow felt unsettling, and you know
• 51:13
  Speaker 1: the subject matter as well. When you think about these
• 51:16
  Speaker 1: the subjects walking in relativity, clearly never getting anywhere, walking
• 51:21
  Speaker 1: downstairs sideways, all of a sudden, I'm walking back into
• 51:25
  Speaker 1: the same staircase I was just on. Like you imagine,
• 51:28
  Speaker 1: if these things were to come alive, they would be frustrated,
• 51:32
  Speaker 1: angry people.
• 51:33
  Speaker 2: Right.
• 51:33
  Speaker 3: And as a matter of fact, one of the one
• 51:36
  Speaker 3: that you're just talking about upstairs downstairs, they that was
• 51:41
  Speaker 3: supposedly based on some a staircase in his school. Oh really,
• 51:48
  Speaker 3: which suddenly says quite a bit about his psychology, don't
• 51:50
  Speaker 3: you think?
• 51:51
  Speaker 1: Well? How so?
• 51:52
  Speaker 2: Well?
• 51:53
  Speaker 3: I mean, like, these students aren't going anywhere, they're not
• 51:55
  Speaker 3: even human. There's centipedes with human faces, gotcha, gotcha.
• 51:59
  Speaker 2: And they're kind of trapped in this well.
• 52:01
  Speaker 3: You could definitely call like a a purposeless existence in
• 52:08
  Speaker 3: this building. It's kind of a dark building.
• 52:11
  Speaker 1: Interesting. So he does finally achieve really great fame later
• 52:16
  Speaker 1: in his life. Like you said, he was holding exhibitions
• 52:20
  Speaker 1: in the Netherlands and a little bit in Europe, but
• 52:23
  Speaker 1: he did one in Belgium in nineteen fifty. That led
• 52:26
  Speaker 1: to an article in The Studio, which was an art magazine,
• 52:31
  Speaker 1: and that captured the attention of a journalist who wrote
• 52:34
  Speaker 1: about him in Time and Life magazines, which definitely propped
• 52:38
  Speaker 1: him up a little bit.
• 52:38
  Speaker 2: Yo.
• 52:39
  Speaker 1: Yeah. Then that led to a larger exhibition at the
• 52:42
  Speaker 1: International Mathematical Congress in fifty four. Flash forward to sixty six,
• 52:48
  Speaker 1: he was featured in Mathematical Games Column and Scientific American
• 52:53
  Speaker 1: by Martin Gardner mathemagician, I guarantee you that's a thing.
• 53:00
  Speaker 1: And that increased his And this was sixty six, so
• 53:03
  Speaker 1: it was kind of perfect timing with the hippies and
• 53:06
  Speaker 1: the drugs and the counterculture. And I guess who was
• 53:09
  Speaker 1: at Graham.
• 53:09
  Speaker 3: Nash Graham Nash Mick Jagger sent him a fan ladder
• 53:13
  Speaker 3: and made the mistake of calling him by his first name.
• 53:16
  Speaker 3: Oh really, Jessher did not appreciate Stanley Kubrick tried to
• 53:19
  Speaker 3: recruit him to make two thousand and one in Space Odyssey,
• 53:23
  Speaker 3: a fourth dimensional film.
• 53:25
  Speaker 1: Huh.
• 53:25
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 53:25
  Speaker 3: There's this interesting article called the Impossible World of mc
• 53:28
  Speaker 3: Escher that Stephen Poole wrote in The Guardian that has
• 53:31
  Speaker 3: a lot of that stuff in it. But he was
• 53:33
  Speaker 3: kind of like, no, I'm good over here with my
• 53:35
  Speaker 3: mathematician friends.
• 53:37
  Speaker 1: Well, once he was featured in Scientific American, that led
• 53:40
  Speaker 1: to the big daddy of them all. He got featured
• 53:43
  Speaker 1: in Rolling Stone, and then after that it was all over.
• 53:47
  Speaker 2: He was huge, Yeah, dorm room huge.
• 53:50
  Speaker 1: Four hundred and forty eight works. Then this doesn't count
• 53:54
  Speaker 1: all the sketches and drafts. These are like the actual
• 53:57
  Speaker 1: final works, right, And like we said earlier, he dies
• 54:00
  Speaker 1: nineteen seventy two of cancer the age of seventy three.
• 54:04
  Speaker 1: And I tried to find more about his family, but
• 54:06
  Speaker 1: there's not a lot out there, like his sons and
• 54:08
  Speaker 1: whether or not his I mean, I guess his grandkids
• 54:10
  Speaker 1: would be contemporaries of ours.
• 54:14
  Speaker 3: Yep, I don't know, Like he was born in eighteen
• 54:17
  Speaker 3: ninety nine, Well, great grandkids maybe.
• 54:20
  Speaker 1: Yeah, Okay, I guess if his kids were born in
• 54:23
  Speaker 1: the nineteen twenties, Yeah, contemporaries of our parents maybe.
• 54:27
  Speaker 2: Sure. The old stirs Yeah boomers.
• 54:30
  Speaker 1: Hey, boomer, Boomer. Okay, boom hey boomer. So get that right.
• 54:35
  Speaker 3: In that Journey to Infinity movie, apparently all three of
• 54:38
  Speaker 3: his children appear in it.
• 54:40
  Speaker 2: Oh really, if you want to know more about them,
• 54:42
  Speaker 2: go watch that.
• 54:43
  Speaker 1: I saw one picture of him where he looked a
• 54:46
  Speaker 1: lot like our old colleague John Fuller when John had
• 54:49
  Speaker 1: a beard.
• 54:49
  Speaker 3: Oh yeah he did, didn't It looked a little bit
• 54:51
  Speaker 3: like him. Yeah, it's not expecting that, nop. So there's
• 54:55
  Speaker 3: mc es sure, that's right. Speaking of not expecting that,
• 55:00
  Speaker 3: Babe on Corvette Sure and Hooters air Line made appearances
• 55:07
  Speaker 3: in the mcs. You're I just want to point out
• 55:09
  Speaker 3: if you want to know more about any of those things,
• 55:11
  Speaker 3: go on to the internet and start searching. And since
• 55:14
  Speaker 3: I said that, it's time for listener mail.
• 55:19
  Speaker 1: Hey guys, I've been listening to your show since twenty eleven.
• 55:22
  Speaker 1: I even seeing you. I've even seen you on your
• 55:25
  Speaker 1: first amazing show in Chicago and had to wait a
• 55:27
  Speaker 1: whole year to hear that on the podcast. Oh yeah,
• 55:31
  Speaker 1: that's how it works.
• 55:32
  Speaker 3: Sure, Sorry, it's not even guaranteed that it's going to
• 55:36
  Speaker 3: be the show you saw.
• 55:37
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 55:37
  Speaker 1: A lot of podcasts put out just tons and tons
• 55:40
  Speaker 1: of live shows. We don't do that. No, Yeah, and
• 55:44
  Speaker 1: I honestly think the live shows are a little better
• 55:46
  Speaker 1: in person. I don't think they make as a fan
• 55:48
  Speaker 1: of other podcasts, I don't think they make for the
• 55:51
  Speaker 1: best just regular content.
• 55:53
  Speaker 2: I think most people think.
• 55:54
  Speaker 1: That, but we just so. That's why we only put
• 55:56
  Speaker 1: out the one, right, So back to the letter, This
• 55:58
  Speaker 1: show is so great I would even save high interest
• 56:01
  Speaker 1: episodes for my son to listen to over the years. Nice,
• 56:05
  Speaker 1: you were one of the few people that can keep
• 56:07
  Speaker 1: his attention. I never thought I would write, but as
• 56:09
  Speaker 1: a science teacher, you said something recently that's so true.
• 56:12
  Speaker 1: Some of the best science websites are children's science websites.
• 56:16
  Speaker 1: Or if a definition is too difficult, I always tell
• 56:18
  Speaker 1: people to look up a child's definition for that word.
• 56:22
  Speaker 1: Really good tip, guys. Thanks for sharing that. Thanks for
• 56:24
  Speaker 1: all your work, and now I will have to figure
• 56:26
  Speaker 1: out what to do now that I am finally caught up.
• 56:30
  Speaker 1: Keep up the great work. And that is from Jenny
• 56:32
  Speaker 1: with an Eye.
• 56:33
  Speaker 2: Thanks Jenny with an Eye.
• 56:35
  Speaker 3: Hopefully you dot the I with the heart, maybe with
• 56:37
  Speaker 3: a little reflection on the side of the heart. You
• 56:39
  Speaker 3: remember that one two curve lines top with topped and
• 56:44
  Speaker 3: I guess bottomed with.
• 56:45
  Speaker 2: A straight line.
• 56:46
  Speaker 1: I think I know what you're talking about, Caro.
• 56:47
  Speaker 2: I'll show you.
• 56:50
  Speaker 1: Oh boy, since we just dis oh oh sure that yeah, yeah.
• 56:56
  Speaker 3: It almost looks like a bent Roman numeral to inside
• 57:01
  Speaker 3: the heart. That's the reflection of light. That's where the
• 57:04
  Speaker 3: light's coming from.
• 57:05
  Speaker 1: It's beautiful.
• 57:05
  Speaker 2: Thanks to Escher reference.
• 57:07
  Speaker 1: I'll treasure that.
• 57:08
  Speaker 2: You're welcome check. I wasn't going to give it to you,
• 57:10
  Speaker 2: but now.
• 57:11
  Speaker 1: I have to just sign it first.
• 57:12
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• 57:14
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• 57:17
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• 57:19
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• 57:22
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• 57:24
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• 57:29
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