Drawing Hands - M.C. Escher

Drawing Hands - M.C. Escher Note Card One of Maurits Cornelis Escher‘s best-known images, this lithograph of two hands drawing each other presents several of the artist’s favorite concepts. Most notably, it is an example of what author Douglas Hofstadter has called a “strange loop,” a paradoxical system which continuously self-referentially repeats with no seeming beginning or end. Escher was fascinated by such paradoxical recursions; this is also one of his clearest explorations of the illusionism implicit in representational art, as the line between two-dimensional drawing and three-dimensional reality are cleverly at play. The arms, wrists, and cuffs of this drawing are a simple sketch, but as the hands emerge from the picture as though crossing from the threshold of fantasy to reality, the picture adopts a completely different perspective.