I guess that's what's so much fun about a drawing like the weird Escherian "stair-scapes". As drawings these pictures are clearly not impossible. Because, after all, if the drawings were impossible, they could not exist.beyond wrote:Ann, they can't be impossible. If they were impossible, the last two posts about Escher would not be here for us to see. I may be as blind as a bat when it comes to seeing a black number on dark purple, but surely i cannot see something that cannot possibly be there, right
But the drawings look pretty "realistic". More specifically, every little detail you can see in the drawings looks realistic. Each starcase looks real. Each person walking up and dwon a staircase looks, well, not exactly real because they have no faces, but they sure look like acceptable approximations of human beings. What's more, it looks absolutely realistic that these faceless people could walk up or down a staircase they way they do. Every person in Escher's drawing is put in a position which looks absolutely realistic and believable.
It's only when we try to "fit all those staircases into the same room" that the feeling of realism evaporates. Because while each and every staircase and person walking on it looks perfectly realistic, when put together in the same "room" the "sum" of them creates an overwhelming sense of the impossible. Because there is no way, ever, that we could build a room with all those staircases in it at the same time, with people walking up and down those staircases the way they do in Escher's drawing.
Adding to the impossibility of imagining the entirety of that room in three dimensions and in a world governed either by Newtonian gravity or described by Einstein's curved space, is that we can't see the seams. We can't see any cracks that would tell us where Escher's two-dimensional projection of our ordinary realistic three-dimensional world dissolves into gravitational chaos.
So the picture looks absolutely realistic in its details, while the sum of it creates gasp-inducing vertigo.
The devil is usually in the details. But in Escher's drawings there is no devil in the details. It's the way those perfectly ordinary-looking details are fitted together to make an impossible whole that makes your head spin.
Ann
), and across from my hotel in a park for several days running, there was an outdoor art exhibit. One artist had an abstract work, a composite, that I found really intriguing and wanted to buy (I visited it every day, sometimes twice a day!), but alas, I just couldn't justify the expense at the time. I've thought about that work ever since; it's the one that got away. 
