Mc Escher

My appreciation of art has been so influenced by the power of photography to capture things as I see them that I fail to see the works of M. C. Escher as being very artistic. If art is supposed to show the power of human beings to capture the essence of objects as we see them, Escher seems to be trying to show us things we could never see, but that try to be art like cinnamon rolls that come from a refrigerated can of dough and icing might try to replace real cinnamon rolls in our lives. Of the eight small pictures shown around the weird building topped with stairs and a tiny tower on the cover of M C ESCHER by Sandra Forty published by TAJ BOOKS 2003, a square near the lower right corner looks like a swirling combination of reptiles cooked up from splotchy shapes as a pattern emerges from the 10 x 10 squares around the edges, the shape of which suggests a pan of something from the oven.I was introduced to the work of M C Escher about 33 years ago, after I was an adult attempting to understand the ways in which highly educated people understand the world. Or, in the case of M C Escher, there seems to be real questions about what people are doing here at all. On the stairs at the top of the building on the cover, the outer 14 hooded walkers seem to be climbing, holding the outer railing in their left hands, while the 12 inner walkers pass them descending the stairs with their left hands on the inner railing. The inner courtyard does not appear to be square, because the front wall is so much longer than the back, but due to perspective, each step appears to be higher or lower than any other step.Maurits Cornelis Escher lived from 1898 to 1972, about the span of life of my grandparents, and page 5, which contains that information, also shows "House of Stairs" (my favorite Escher design) in the center of that page, though a larger copy, Plate 40 on page 51, is the same picture at about 6 inches by 12 inches. There are only a few pages in this book that don't have pictures on them. At the top of the pages of text up to page 11, there is a thin strip reproducing a long mural called "Metamorphosis" that is mainly black and white with a little color where a sky full of flying birds transforms into a city by a waterfront with a little bridge to a castle sitting on a chessboard. Escher did a lot, he "left over 2,000 drawings and 448 lithographs, woodcuts, and engravings. . . . His legacy is carefully guarded by the M. C. Escher Foundation at Baarn, The Netherlands." (p. 5). It is not surprising that this book contains some pictures that I did not have before. In the case of Plate 47, "Plane Filling Motif With Fish and Bird," (p. 58) I quickly saw four fish with eyes like circles, but it took me awhile to see a bird in the center between them, with an eye that looked like the number "6" which first seemed to be a cartoonish swirl to depict motion in whatever the fish were swimming in. There is nothing realistic in that picture: it looks more l