The Living Desktop

It is common the idea that mathematics and arts are not allowed, at least this has been my experience when I hear what people say about artistic paint portraits in galleries and museums, well, that is the first impression, just looking into the picture and trying to understand the color, figure structures and size of every object as part of an idea of the author, but there is an special artist who is not so known as Da Vinci or van Gogh does, his name is Maurits Cornelis Escher (June 17, 1898 – March 27, 1972), usually referred as M. C. Escher who was a Dutch graphic artist. Escher's work is most known for its mathematic vision, playing with projective geometry, the impossible constructions, exploration of infinity, architecture and tessellations; in fact I remember that I knew two important works of Escher and I loved them, but until my major studies time I have got the opportunity to discover a magical master piece: The Reptiles, a lithograph of 1943, full of detailed drawing through the plane, just two dimensions as a blue print, and in that time I experienced the feeling of touching down my eyes a three dimensional entity. On the picture it appears a desktop with a tessellated pattern meta draw of reptiles which suddenly began to walk out side of the pattern getting a three dimensional body aspect into the plane, and climbing, first, up to one book, second, up to a triangle, third, pass towards a dodecahedron, exhaling gas like a dragon, fourth, jumping through a pencils case and finally reentering to the tessellated pattern which is drawing in a piece of paper beneath all these objects. Also there are some exceptional master pieces into the lithograph, towards the bottom left a living cactuses plant standing by a small book on the desk with the letters 'JOB' printed on it, a bottle with a clean and bright glass at the right down corner, and an open book at the up right area.

Nowadays the computer revolution provides three dimensional graphics in several devices such as portable video games, sophisticated personal computers and even in recent movies this kind of graphics is one of the most important special effects, and it seems that always this impression has been here between us, but it is not like that, It began just twenty years ago, but it could be impossible for the M.C. Escher time of life. At the time when I reviewed the lithograph for the second time I discovered it again but as a living desktop, it moves every time when I take a sigh, the reptiles are walking around the paper, around my walking imagination.