MC Escher – Page 4 – { feuilleton }

Blivets

Cover by Norman Mingo, March 1965.

It’s a short step from Escher’s perceptual games to optical illusions in general. Blivets are one of those curious cultural artefacts that appear everywhere but whose origin is a mystery. Even the name blivet isn’t settled (or, for that matter, the meaning of the word) since the impossible figure is also known as The Devil’s Tuning Fork (or Pitchfork), The Ambiguous Trident, the Mad magazine Poiuyt, and more. It was the Mad usage that prompted me to draw these things endlessly on schoolbooks. A friend had a collection of the paperback reprints of the magazine which I eagerly borrowed; Poiuyts are a running joke in issues of the 1960s, appearing on maps or diagrams, or simply sitting in the margin of a page.

Anonymous reader submission, Analog, June 1964.

Wikipedia’s article on the blivet mentions the figure appearing in a 1964 issue of Analog Science Fiction and Fact but I suspect it goes back much further. This is one of those simple jokes that could have been invented during an idle moment in a factory or office then spread meme-like among workers. Blivets are easy to remember, and can be quickly drawn anywhere which explains their staying power today. Glenn Jones’ T-shirt design is only one of many recent examples. There’s more to be seen at Mighty Optical Illusions.

Undecidable Monument (1968) by Roger Hayward.

Escher’s Dogs by Glenn Jones.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• False perspective
• Trompe l’oeil

Escher’s snakes

The Magic Mirror of MC Escher (1985).

MC Escher has been in the news recently as a result of the exhibition at the National Galleries of Scotland. By coincidence, I’ve been engaged in some Escher-like work of my own this week, the project at hand being one that makes reference to Escher-style effects rather than anything specifically derived from the artist’s prints. As a consequence of this I’ve had Bruno Ernst’s book lying around, the cover of which kept catching my eye with its astonishing precision. The standard collection, The World of MC Escher (1971), has been on the shelf for many years but I only picked up a copy of the Ernst book a few months ago. It’s an ideal complement to the earlier volume being a combined monograph and analysis of Escher’s pictorial effects which includes sketches, reference material and even a few pieces that aren’t included in the bigger book.

The print on the cover, Snakes (1969), is a woodcut of incredible accuracy, a quality that’s much more evident in the Ernst book which not only shows the print in colour but also shows more of the preliminary sketches that the earlier book. Many viewers of this print might be fascinated by the fractally interlaced circles but for me the fascination is in the scales of the snakes and the perfect grading of light and dark, concave and convex. We’re used to woodcuts being fairly crude representations (see yesterday’s post) but Escher used the medium with absolute precision. The sketches show how he worked out the arrangement of the scales although he still had to carve every line perfectly—then do the same again for the other two snakes. This was Escher’s last print but as Ernst says, “it proved that there was no diminution in his skill”.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The Fantastic World of MC Escher
• MC Escher album covers
• Escher and Schrofer

Colleen Corradi Brannigan’s Invisible Cities

Cities and Memory 5: Maurilia.

Colleen Corradi Brannigan’s multimedia project was linked here back in 2011 when news of her endeavours reached a number of high-profile websites. These artworks are another attempt to depict all of Italo Calvino’s cities, this time using a range of media that includes sculpture. I like the variety of this series; some of the depictions approach the more rigorous perspectives of MC Escher while others are as loose as Expressionist paintings. The website also includes extracts from Calvino’s descriptions.

Trading Cities 4: Ersilia.

Thin Cities 3: Armilla.

Continue reading “Colleen Corradi Brannigan’s Invisible Cities”

Weekend links 264

Stonehenge Suite, No.10 (1977) by Malcolm Dakin.

• “Part of me always wanted to write a teatime drama. That’s something that I wanted to get out of my system,” says director Peter Strickland. The results may be heard here. In the same interview there’s news that Strickland will be adapting Nigel Kneale’s The Stone Tape for radio later this year.

• “He was, as one obituary stated in terms unusually blunt for the time, ‘not as other men’.” Strange Flowers on the eccentric and profligate Henry Cyril Paget (1875–1905) aka The Dancing Marquess.

• “Please tell Mr Jagger I am not Maurits to him.” MC Escher rebuking The Rolling Stones. The artist is the subject of a major exhibition at the National Galleries of Scotland from June 27th.

Often mentioned in the same breath as works of James Joyce and Samuel Beckett, Ó Cadhain’s novel is, in some ways, even more radically experimental. For starters, all the characters are dead and speaking from inside their coffins, which are interred in a graveyard in Connemara, on Ireland’s west coast. The novel has no physical action or plot, but rather some 300 pages of cascading dialogue without narration, description, stage direction, or any indication of who’s speaking when.

Niamh Ní Mhaoileoin on the newly-translated Cré na Cille (The Dirty Dust) by Máirtín Ó Cadhain

• Paul Woods examines “10 Edgy Properties No Film Producer Dared To Touch
(Yet)”. No. 2 is David Britton’s Lord Horror.

• Mallory Ortberg ranks paintings of Saint Sebastian “in ascending order of sexiness and descending order of actual martyring”.

• The Sign of Satan (1964): Christopher Lee in a story by Robert Bloch for The Alfred Hitchcock Hour.

• Sympathy For The Devil – The True Story of The Process Church of the Final Judgment.

• At Dangerous Minds: Paul Gallagher on the seedy malevolence of Get Carter (1971).

• Mix of the week: Sonic Attack Special – Earth by Bob’s Podcasts.

• Sanctuary Stone (1973) by Midwinter | The Litanies Of Satan (1982) by Diamanda Galás | Sola Stone (2006) by Boris

Crystal balls

The Crystal Ball (c. 1900) by Robert Anning Bell.

Crystal balls in art, film and the pulp magazines.

The Crystal Ball (1902) by John William Waterhouse.

Alexander, Crystal Seer (1910).

Continue reading “Crystal balls”