1 comments about M.C. Escher 2007 Calendar: Uncommon Ground.

1. This calendar always receives a comment when visitors see it-- it's just fun!!

1 comments about The Graphic Work of M. C. Escher.

1. M.C. Escher, make many contributions to the art and math-related sciences. This awesome book, a must-have relic, shows, the graphic work of this artist, showing us, the complexity and mistery of many of his works, from his popular "Metamorphosis" series to it's "impossible paintings", like "Waterfalls" or "Concave and Convex". The quallity of the illsutrations and content is excellent. This is, a must-have book, for any artist, graphic designer, scientist, or people, interested on contemporary, and impressive art.

1 comments about The M.C. Escher Jigsaw Puzzle Book.

1. This puzzle book should be on every child's bookshelf. The chosen pictures are a great selection of Escher's work. The book is sturdy and the idea to create room for the puzzlepieces to be stored inside is marvelous. It is a great way to introduce Art to children and I hope to see more books of the same kind.

5 comments about Escher on Escher: Exploring the Infinite.

1. I feel that this book seems, at first glance, to be much better than it really is. That is, when one picks up the book for the first time in a book store and flips through the pages, one gets the impression that it will actually be interesting to read, and will help in understanding Escher's genius. But really, the works themselves are the only things this book offers, the text is basically useless, shallow and uninteresting.



2. Maurits Escher, as an artist, needs no introduction. As a writer, however, he is not nearly well known enough. This short book collects some of his early writings from rather obscure journals, and presents a lecture that was never actually given.
   
   Escher is well known for his precise renderings, and we are blessed with writing in the same precise style. He wrote out the script for his lecture in full, before it was to be given. That means that, when a medical emergency forced its cancellation, the lecture was preserved in its entirety. Like his geometric woodcuts and his precise lithographs, the calm of the text belies the passion that lay behind it. Escher spent decades in poverty before his well-earned fame, and pursued visions for which he had no good words and certainly no companions. That same drive was what pushed his skill as a woodblock artist down to the limits of his hands and his materials, below the limit of his unaided eye.
   
   Although not trained in math or the hard sciences, he puts a human face on subtle mathematical concepts. The infinite and unbounded is a common idea, the finite and bounded is part of everyday life. These aren't his words, but he pursued the finite and unbounded, in tiled patterns on the surface of a sphere. He also sought out the infinite and bounded, and found it in the Cirle Limit pieces and other works.
   
   This book is the only inexpensive and easily accesible source of Escher's own thoughts on his work. It's not a catalog of his work - most of the reproductions so small that they only suggest the piece depicted, or remind a viewer already familiar with the work. It's not a biography, although it has a few biographical details. People with the wrong expectations are sure to be disappointed in this.
   
   I'm happy with it. It is a very enjoyable look at his cool manner of presentation. Like his Three Worlds litho, it presents a surface of meaning, but shows reflections of distant ideas and hints at his hidden depths.
   
   //wiredweird



3. I think I was under the impression that this was a bigger book or something, but I wish it had bigger, better pictures. This is a paperback with lots more writing than pictures. Small pictures and not a ton of them. Decent book from what I've skimmed.



4. this book contains notes and unheard lectures that escher had prepared, in which he explains the method of making his tesselations and patterns. after reading this book, i felt the mystery dissipated, but also inspired to try out some of the concepts (for example, for creating gradations from one figure to the next). i found it really interesting that he so openly acknowledged that he didn't understand much of the theory and text on crystallography, but found new directions in his own work after looking at some imagery from that field. i did find myself glossing over the text of the second half of the book, though, since some of the same thoughts he said were re-iterated, as well as the theme of loneliness in his life.



5. 
   As a longtime fan of Escher's work,I found this an excellent book.I have several books of Escher's work,a couple of jigsaw puzzles,and his "Kaleidocycles" of 17 full-color ,three dimensional ,folding models.This book is very interesting to any fan of Escher's work as it is Escher himself explaining his reasons for creating his art.
   For a long time, he was virtually alone in his field, that combines both graphic art and Geometric Mathematics.
   Reading the book is as close as one can get to attending lectures by the master himself. Escher prepared lectures that were accompanied with slides of his work that he intended to give to explain his work. The book contains the complete text of these lectures as well as pictures of the slides and his explanations.
   The book shows what great difficulty he had in gaining acceptance of his work ,which critics had great difficulty in catgorizing his work and thus tended to ignore it for many years.
   While the reproductions in this book are small,as other reviewers have mentioned,don't let that discourage you from getting this book.There are other books with much larger reproductions that show off his work much better.But, if you want to get a much deeper knowledge of this wonderful artist and understand his motives and life;you would have a hard time in finding a better sourse to turn to.

1 comments about M C Escher.

1. 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 like a ragged potholder than a photograph, but the page is so black it can't be anything but ink on a page, which is what it is.

   Escher's work is not totally devoid of women. One in a white dress is walking into "Convex and Concave" in Plate 56 (p. 67). Plate 7 shows "Jetta (Escher's wife)" 1925 woodcut 49.2 x 27.8 cm, looking very proper, with a collar that extends from shoulder to shoulder, holding a flower in front of a dark outfit that shows nothing of her figure, with her eyes lowered so that she can only see the flower if she is seeing anything. Her hair is neatly parted, but a tiny curl is visible by one temple. The picture is so black and white, the impression is that only her face, the flower and her hand are white, while her collar, neck and aura are trying to reside somewhere in between the light and the mystery where the shadow of her nose meets the edge of her lips. People who have worked with wood and a gouge will be able to detect each cut in the wood, and the only thing which is stark about the picture is that his use of technique is so visible.

   A famous design, Plate 51 "Gravity" 1952 Lithograph and watercolor (p. 62), shows orange, purple, green, yellow, red, blue creatures standing on star-shaped planes with a point over the back of each creature. One point is a bit off center, with the five points of the plane on which the yellow creature is standing close to the edges of the picture, though five more points offset in the background suggest that the shape continues around to the other side. The creatures are arranged so each is shown from a different angle, each facing in a unique direction, but each seems to reflect the same dull recognition: I Know, I know, i know, i . . .

No comments about The World of M.C.Escher.

2 comments about Masterpieces in 3-d - M. C. Escher and the Art of Illusion (Hardcover).

1. The book provides a good rendition on comparative spatial
   forms. It depicts the following:
   o a self portrait of a man in a chair
   o starfish-like images
   o multiple puddles
   o rippled surfaces
   o dew drops
   o a hand and reflecting sphere
   
   The contents would provide good artistic conversation in
   a modern art setting.



2. During his life time, M.C. Escher made 448 lithographs, woodcuts and wood engravings and over 2000 drawings and sketches. He is also known as books illustrator, painter, and decorator. It would take the volumes to publish all his works and Katherine Gleason's "Masterpieces in 3-d - M. C. Escher and the Art of Illusion" does not try to capture all of them. The book contains 40 of Escher's most famous prints and drawings in 3-D. Each print is accompanied with the short but informative and interesting caption. The prints start with the master's early Self-portrait in a Chair which was created in 1920 when Escher was 22 years old, and end with his very last "Snakes" (1969), woodcut printed from three blocks in orange, green, and black. Between the two, the fascinated reader-viewer will enjoy Escher's unforgettable prints showing impossible structures that lead nowhere in never ending movement, the visions of reflection connecting different spatial realities in one image, the closed and infinite systems of creation and cycles, and the prints from his series of tessellating figures that morphed from one form to another, from dimensionality to flatness, from darkness to light and back, and from reality to illusion.
   
   I've been a huge fan of Escher's works for many years since I saw his lithographs "Hand with Reflecting Sphere", "Three Worlds", Reptiles", "Drawing Hands", "Waterfall", "Relativity", "Cycle", and woodcuts "Day and Night" and "Tower of Babel" first time many years ago. They are all in the Katherine Gleason's book, and I can enjoy them now as 3-D images. The effect is mesmerizing, mysterious, and marvelous. I bought this book as the gift to myself, and it is one of the best gifts I've had. I open it every day, looking through the lenses of the fold out glasses at the picture bringing it into focus and watching it becoming alive and three-dimensional. I know it is about the laws of physics and optics but I like to call it a miracle that I am a part of and that happens in front of my eyes.

5 comments about The Magic of M. C. Escher.

1. High-quality reproductions of the amazing artworks. Minimalistic style of comments and excerpts from artist's letters gives you a focus on subtle details and motives, and lets images tell you the rest.



2. Escher was a Dutch wanna-be mathematician, who expressed himself through incredibly intricate, creative works of art. This book contains hundreds of his drawing as well as his notebook sketches, which is interesting to look at because you get to see how he developed his drawings. Accompanying most of the pictures in this book are excerpts of letters that he wrote to various people. If you want a book on Escher's work, then this is the one to buy! Fantastic.



3. Given as a gift by a special friend of mine, the book has always adorned the coffee table in the living room as a centerpiece that never fails to attract the attention of both art lovers and art dabblers alike. Perhaps it could be said that my interest in the two seemingly disparate field of mathematics and art motivated that friend of mine to purchase the book, as Escher himself apparently believed and proved that those two seemingly unrelated fields could be beautifully synthesized in a brilliant fusion of creativity. The result is more than convincing.



4. Wonderful coffee-table book of Escher's best drawing illusions. Even the jackets is two-sided and imaginatively done with style.



5. Almost cinematic in design and construction, truly, "The Magic of M.C. Escher" is a breakthrough book on the works of this artist. Every page is filled with inspiration and surprise. Designed by a gifted art director named Erik The' and produced by Andreas Landshoff, this book flows together to form a loving catalogue of Mr. Escher's visions. It is unlike other books based on Escher which tend to be either tutorial or biographical in nature. Whereas these past books, more or less, deconstruct and analyze his works mainly through words, "The Magic of M.C. Escher" successfully accomplishes this through the images themselves, revelling in their sheer beauty, from his preliminary studies all the way to the finished prints. There are many double foldout pages to better impact Escher's mastery of his craft. Some of the pages are filled, corner to corner, with extremely detailed, magnified sections of specific works that allow the reader to closely experience what it's like to be "nose to nose" with the actual prints.
   
   This book catapults the reader into Escher's world immediately. Before you even open the title page, you discover that the inside of the dust cover reproduces, in full color, of course, "Metamorphosis III" in three horizontal panels each measuring an astounding 39" across. This book brings us along on a visual journey ajoined by Escher's own words, as if he is personally giving us insights on a guided tour of his works. It thoughtfully limits itself to short excerpts from Escher's lectures and letters whose sole purpose is to compliment glorious, detailed photographs of original work. It's filled with Escher's never-before published pencil studies and sketches, extreme closeups of his prints, and detailed photographs of his original carved wood blocks. The pencil studies from his notebooks allow us to follow his thought processes and fully appreciate the endless hours he joyfully and dutifully spent on formulating the precise combination of graphic elements to arrive at his finished images.
   
   The book makes side-by-side visual comparisons of earlier works that inspired Escher to create more self-satisfying images that better convey his "relative division of the plane" and other spacial concepts. Most of its visual content were supplied by two sources: The M.C.Escher Foundation and Michael Sachs, a private collector and print dealer from Connecticut.
   
   Overall, this is book is a stunning, loving homage to this master of printmaking and genius to the graphic arts. Nothing is spared in this book's construction and design. If the adage is true that a picture is worth a thousand words, "The Magic of M.C.Escher" could fill a library.

5 comments about M. C. Escher ® Kaleidocycles: An Illustrated Book and 17 Fun-to-Assemble Three-Dimensional Models.

1. "A kaleidocycle is a closed chain of tetrahedra that can cycle endlessly through a center hole. ? Best known for his strangely realistic depictions of things that defy the laws of physics, Maurits Cornelis Escher became interested in problems of repetition and symmetry after traveling to the Alhambra, a 14th century Moorish castle in Granada, Spain. Fascinated by the periodic (i.e. regularly recurrent) designs of the castle's mosaics, he began to pursue the idea that a plane can be divided into uniform, interlocking figures, forming a pattern that repeats itself at set intervals, theoretically to infinity. Instead of simply combining abstract shapes to produce a pattern, however, Escher decided to use more meaningful figures--shells and starfish, angels and devils, for example--images that could be connected not just graphically but also conceptually. Kaleidocycles, created by mathematician Doris Schattschneider and graphic designer Wallace Walker, explores the three-dimensional implications of Escher's two-dimensional periodic designs. With a little glue, you can easily assemble the enclosed models--all printed with repeating patterns derived from the artist's original drawings--into various kaleidocycles and geometric solids. In doing so, you will transform Escher's beautiful designs into true examples of infinite repetition: the interlocking images will wrap endlessly over the surfaces of the three-dimensional objects. ? Kaleidocycles contains a 48-page book with over 80 reproductions and diagrams, assembly instructions, and a fascinating discussion of the geometric principles and artistic challenges underlying Escher's designs and their transformation to three-dimensional models; and seventeen die-cut, scored, three-dimensional models (11 kaleidocycles and 6 geometric solids) Cigar box-style packaging, size: 9-1/2 x 12-1/4 x 1-1/2". [Refers to revised edition:] ISBN: 0-7649-3110-5
   
   KALEIDOCYCLES 3-D MODELS ONLY
   "Purchase an extra set of the 17 models for each additional participant. Assembly instructions are not included. ISBN: 0-7649-3207-1."--? Pomegranate



2. If you are as fascinated with the graphics of Escher as I am; you'll be entertained,amazed and engrossed with this 'kit' which allows you to assemble and hold these wonderful models of intrigueing mathematics , coupled with the graphic art and figures of the master himself; M.C.Escher.
   It is one thing to look at Escher's magnificient work in 2-dimension; but it is another experience entirely, to hold these 3-dimensional models and view the figures and patterns as you turn as fold these models on themselves,
   One of the other reviewers talked about creating additional models; and that is obviously possible ,because there is all the information needed to do that; right here in the book.
   I have had this kit for some time ; but hadn't actually constructed any of the models. I recently was told about a man who constructed ball and stick models. I contacted him,and visited him to see his models. I brought along with me a book ,
   "Polyhedron Models" by Magnus Wenninger .This is an outstanding book covering the subject as well as 119 models. The man I was visiting ,had the book and even knew its author. This book deals with models whose surfaces are flat and made of cardboard or if desired ,other materials. To see what these fascinating models look like, look them up on the net under "Magnus Wenninger".
   The man I visited constructs similar models;but uses only wooden balls and sticks. Think of those chemistry models of compounds,and you can imagine how beautiful and interesting they can be. All models begin with one of the known uniform polyhedra and from them the stellated models are formed. The variations are in the many millions.
   Anyone who has much interest in this sort of stuff will find an excellent chapter ,Polyhedra,in "Mathematical Recreations and Essays" by W.W. Rouse Ball,a real classic in the subject of Mathematical Recreations.
   The man I went to visit has been working on these models for many,many years. He has created his own techniques and even an intrigueing appratus to make the holes in the balls. The exactness is so critical,that making them by hand would be terribly difficult. To date he has made about 500 0f these ball and stick models.
   So, after my visit,it was a real joy to sit down and construct some models.



3. This is the bet presentation and best manufactured kaleidocycles that I had bought. Sent in a very good and fast way.



4. Want to get your kids or students interested in math? Let them put together a geometric solid covered with interlocking trolls or other tesselated designs, then hang them from the playroom ceiling! Your kids will never get over it!
   
   Beautifully colored, easily put together. and very, very neat...



5. My 9-year-old son and I had tremendous fun assembling the models in this kit. Each of the models in the kit contains an adaptation of Escher's periodic design in a way that the geometric solid is continously covered with it. Though a unique personal experience, my son learned what tetrahedron, octahedron, dodecahedron, cuboctahedron and kaleidocycle look like. This is the best project we ever worked on.

No comments about Escher 2009 Wall Calendar.