Museum Courtyard: Above & Below

Mouse is playing a game of “three-point perspective hide-and-go-seek” at the Currier Museum’s Escher exhibit…

It looks like we’ve learned our lesson from the last time we played on a three-dimensional staircase; here, we’ve been careful to locate the vanishing points OUTSIDE the frame of our image.  

Drawing on a board much larger than our paper, we were able to tape down the paper and fix both vanishing points (A) and (B) like so:

Do some of the lines seem a bit, well, imprecise to you?  Since we were leaning on the railing of the museum balcony and trying NOT to drop our ruler, pen, and entire clipboard down onto the unsuspecting cats of museum-goers below, our coordination of the third vanishing point (C) was rather less accurate…

Besides, (C) ended up so low down that it was completely OFF the clipboard, like so:

Yup, it’s down there somewhere!  No wonder the lower arches of the courtyard got a little wobbly…

Anyhow, here are all three vanishing points, with a few guidelines each:

M. C. Escher fans will of course recognize the creepy contents of the courtyard as inspired by Three Worlds (1955):

I’ve always liked how this image works — peering DOWN into the depths of the pond, we’re also peering UP into the reflection of the sky.  It’s a much more interesting effect (architecturally and environmentally) than a blank tile museum floor, at any rate!  Clearly, Escher had vertical symmetries on his mind in 1955; earlier in the year he printed Convex and Concave, where again “up” and “down” are very much questions of perspective:

Finally, here is some student artwork (in progress) from this same November 2014 museum expedition:

  << (This last image is a self-portrait in the rounded mirror of the restroom hand-dryer handles, also a la Escher.)