Memorandum Monday

I’m joining in with Sian’s Memorandum Monday which encourages you to share something you learned or someplace new you visited over the weekend. I managed both—a new place and lots of new information. Over the weekend we were on the road from Rochester to Fort Myers Beach. To break up the long days of driving, we try to make a stop along the way. Last March someone recommended the North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh, North Carolina. The weather was so bad that trip that we didn’t get to Raleigh in time to visit the museum. This trip the roads were great–no weather to contend with at all, and I’m now glad we missed the museum last year since the special exhibit on now is one of M.C. Escher’s work.

What I knew of M.C. Escher’s work were his fantastic woodcuts of patterns and designs where one image merges into another, or his explorations of space. I didn’t know he had also created wonderful drawings and woodcuts of landscapes, particularly of Italy. The exhibition hung his working drawings, the actual wood blocks, and then the final woodcuts side by side. It was a fabulous exhibit; the largest exhibit of his work ever mounted. Some of his works involving geometry were really beyond my ability to comprehend, although I stood in front of some of them trying hard. I should have known better, since geometry was possibly the most difficult course I ever took! (My mother was the teacher which made it even worse. I just didn’t get it.)

Clearly, I needed some help with this:

 Here is another photo (photos in the exhibit were, not surprisingly prohibited) of the striking graphics designed for the exhibit.

And a fun selfie we took on our way to the cafe for lunch.

We’ll definitely come back again since we didn’t have time to see the permanent collection which is housed in a beautiful modern building.