Sun and Moon 1948

M.C. Escher’s "Sun and Moon", made in 1948, is a woodcut, a method that demands a deep engagement with process. I love that Escher embraces the physical nature of the medium: the way the blade moves through the wood to create the block print. This gives it that graphic, almost architectural quality. The birds are locked together in a perpetual dance of warm and cool tones. There’s something mesmerizing in the way he uses the black to suggest both positive and negative space. Look closely and you see the light and dark birds almost seem to chase each other through the composition. It reminds me of some of the op-art paintings from the sixties, where a simple mark can be endlessly repeated and altered. It's like a conversation about infinity, with Escher offering a vision of a world where the boundaries between figure and ground, light and dark, are constantly in flux. Art is about embracing ambiguity, a refusal to settle on any one, fixed interpretation.