Two Birds 1938

Curator: This is M.C. Escher’s “Two Birds,” a linocut print created in 1938. Editor: It makes me think of the sky...not necessarily in a tranquil way, though. It’s orderly, regimented, a bit like clouds arranged on a schedule. Is it just me? Curator: No, I get that. Escher’s work is all about finding patterns, logical systems. Here, the birds interlock so precisely they create a sense of…inevitability. Blue birds, white birds, each perfectly filling the negative space of the other. Birds in symbolic opposition and symbiosis at once! Editor: It feels ancient. Like a Roman mosaic floor discovered under centuries of dust, or even older, the patterns on an ancient potshard, something that has encoded memory in its patterns and color scheme. This limited palette really supports that. Curator: Linocut suits that feeling of antiquity too. The cutting process, the bold lines, the flat colors, gives it a stark, almost hieroglyphic quality. He's turning something organic – birds in flight – into a precise visual algorithm. But the eye still travels, it isn't totally rigid or devoid of flow. Editor: Definitely not. It reminds me that symbols, even those rigidly defined, shift and adapt. Escher captures something about our drive to order and decode the world around us, but then reminds us of nature and spirit. This is order _and_ nature, but nature trapped into a very tight order... it’s strangely…anxious-making? Curator: Maybe that tension is precisely what makes Escher so compelling, the push and pull between the predictable and the unexpected. What starts as clever, visually intriguing, becomes something unsettling... but beautiful too. A slice of structured infinity? Editor: An infinity defined by two alternating states of being! Which, I guess, touches the old idea of opposing forces in nature, and how they create a sort of cosmic harmony in nature, how the entire world breathes because of those alternating actions…fascinating!