Spirals

(B. 390) 1953 Wood engraving in black and grey Signed, dated 'June 7, 1970' and annotated

Here Escher has illustrated the evolution of a perfect and complex object, an unwinding banded cone floating against a grey background. Escher’s inspiration may well have been his desire simply to make this difficult object exist, and to undertake the task of actualization with his chisels, ink and paper, guided by his imagination, experience, and craftsmanship. Creating such perfection is a sublime art and understanding it fully challenges our senses and our intellect. Escher’s spiral cornucopia is constructed of four parallel bands, each shaded with a subtle and systematic arrangement of lines and lozenges. Escher’s technique is deceptively simple, since the print is created by pressing two inked woodblocks onto a sheet of paper. How these two blocks create the three shades in the print – black, grey, and white – is a surprisingly complex and highly technical puzzle, as is the precise geometric arrangement of spiraling lines and shapes. Escher’s inks make visible simultaneously the inside and the outside of the bands which lead us toward infinity. The curves both wrap around and spring out of loops which we can imagine having no beginning and no end; this is clearly part of a growing and evolving thing, somehow both organic and mechanical, an illustration of a object as well as of a creative idea.

The photo to the left shows Escher inscribing and signing this example of Spirals in June, 1970 for his friend Hans de Rijk (Bruno Ernst), author of ‘The Magic Mirror of M. C. Escher’.