M.C. Escher began his career as an architect, but he made his mark with his graphic art. Using a mathematical technique called "tessellation," he produced complex patterns based on repeating shapes in the forms such as butterflies, fish, birds, and lizards.

• "I try in my prints to testify that we live in a beautiful and orderly world, not in a chaos without norms, even though that is how it sometimes appears. My subjects are also often playful: I cannot refrain from demonstrating the nonsensicalness of some of what we take to be irrefutable certainties. It is, for example, a pleasure to deliberately mix together objects of two and three dimensions, surface and spatial relationships, and to make fun of gravity."

• "My work is a game, a very serious game."

• "By keenly confronting the enigmas that surround us, and by considering and analysing the observations that I have made, I ended up in the domain of mathematics, Although I am absolutely without training in the exact sciences, I often seem to have more in common with mathematicians than with my fellow artists."
  Quoted in E Maor, To infinity and beyond (Princeton 1991)

• "To tell you the truth, I am rather perplexed by the concept of 'art'. What one person considers to be 'art' is often not 'art' to another. 'Beautiful' and 'ugly' are old-fashioned concepts that are seldom applied these days; perhaps justifiably, who knows? Something repulsive, which gives you a moral hangover, and hurts your ears or eyes, may well be art. Only 'kitsch' is not art - we're all agreed about that. Indeed, but what is 'kitsch'? If only I knew!"

• "I think I have never yet done any work with the aim of symbolizing a particular idea, but the fact that a symbol is sometimes discovered or remarked upon is valuable for me because it makes it easier to accept the inexplicable nature of my hobbies, which constantly preoccupy me."

• "The regular division of the plane into congruent figures evoking an association in the observer with a familiar natural object is one of these hobbies or problems...I have embarked on this geometric problem again and again over the years, trying to throw light on different aspects each time. I cannot imagine what my life would be like if this problem had never occured to me; one might say that I am head over heels in love with it, and I still don't know why."
  

Other Quotes:

• "Are you really sure that a floor can't also be a ceiling?"

• "He who wonders discovers that this in itself is wonder. "

• "Only those who attempt the absurd will achieve the impossible. I think it's in my basement... let me go upstairs and check. "

" I believe that producing pictures, as I do, is almost solely a question of wanting so very much to do it well." " I could fill an entire second life with working on my prints." " To have peace with this peculiar life; to accept what we do not understand; to wait calmly for what awaits us, you have to be wiser than I am." What I give form to in daylight is only one per cent of what I have seen in darkness." Quoted in D MacHale, Comic Sections (Dublin 1993)

" At moments of great enthusiasm it seems to me that no one in the world has ever made something this beautiful and important." " I am always wandering around in enigmas. There are young people who constantly come to tell me: you, too, are making Op Art. I haven't the slightest idea what that is, Op Art. I've been doing this work for thirty years now." " I don't grow up. In me is the small child of my early days." " I play a tiresome game." " I walk around in mysteries. Each time, youngsters say: you make Op-art too. I don't know what that is, Op-art. This work I have been making for the past thirty years." " The things I want to express are so beautiful and pure." " So let us then try to climb the mountain, not by stepping on what is below us, but to pull us up at what is above us, for my part at the stars; amen."