Starship Asterisk*

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

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.

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

Ann wrote:

Click to view full size image

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

Ann; do I detect a little color here.

Bloody impossible to nail an absolute favorite, but a couple that come to mind immediately are:

Beksinksi


Bouguereau

Greetings from San Pedro Martir in Baja.

mexhunter wrote:Favorite Artist, American.
....Georgia O'Keeffe...

The Lawrence Tree by Georgia O'Keeffe

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Other photos from a great pass from moisture. Hopefully better.
10,000 feet above sea level:
Greetings
César

My most recent acquisition:

That from here. (Someday I'll get this framed and up on a wall.)


An earlier (commissioned) acquisition:

That from here. (Check out his watercolors. This is the guy I'll commission to do the Mars HiRISE paintings I want.)


I have this hanging in the living room: Apologies for the hotspots from lights and flash. That was commissioned in the late 70s by the University of Maryland's Department of Entomology from someone who attended my high school; the artist gave a then-friend and me a numbered print. I am uncertain how I got custody of the work (perhaps because I paid for the framing?), but I'm glad to have it!

A sample from an artist from whom I hope to commission a fabric painting someday:

That from here. (Her mother is also an artist, and her husband, a composer.)
This link is for geckzilla.

Some years ago, I was in San Francisco for work (tough gig ), 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.

All that said, I like a lot of different artists and couldn't possibly pick a favorite.

BMAONE23 wrote:I like Petri's works

I like Petri also. I used to have an Over Population print.

Like owlice, I don’t have a favorite artist… not even a favorite art work.

But here are few I thought would be fun to highlight…

Guess who?



Michelangelo




M.C. Escher... there is devil in the details



A host of artists formed this work…

Roger Dean



Maxfield Parrish



Norman Rockwell



Ub Iwerks

Maxfield Parrish! I have two Parrish prints, a large one of Daybreak, and another that is smaller that I don't know the title of. In all the Parrish books I have/have looked through, I have seen this smaller one only once, decades ago, in a book that an antique dealer owned and let me paw and drool over look through. The smaller work was in the small back room on the main level of my grandparents' house, so I grew up with this work (come to think of it, I suppose my mother did, too). My grandfather was an attorney; his partner gave Daybreak to me when he sold his house. I think these were likely purchased together or at least purchased from the same place, as the frames are similar. They are probably from the 20s or 30s.

These aren't on my walls at the moment; I don't have space right now for Daybreak, and the smaller print needs some TLC before going on a wall again.

So many things to put on a wall, so little wall space!

When you think about it, this is not so bad. They even knew how to use different colors 12,000 to 17,000 years ago.
Ann

Wow! What a great bunch of artwork everyone presented!

Hi:
I think I erased the pictures this time, but I could not change the links, since the ability to edit the post is limited by time.
Here the pictures:
More photos of San Pedro Martir:
After processing more photos, publish them.
Many greetings
César

I had a memory allocation error while posting yesterday in case it matters to anyone else besides me… this morning I remembered it was a “Retribution” print by Pitre that I owned some thirty odd years ago, not “Over Population”.
and one more for posterrorty…

Wyclef jean