Day 289 - Tesselations

No golf today: a while back I had booked tickets for an art exhibition at Dulwich Picture Gallery for Mrs L and myself. I had spotted what turned out to be the first ever UK exhibition of some of the work of MC Escher.  I have always enjoyed his work, in part I suspect because of my mathematical background.

We must have seen most, if not all, of the pieces on show as they were ll on loan from a museum in Den Haag, where we used to live (and can indeed remember going to an Escher museum with les enfants).  That being said, I was particularly struck with some of his earlier pieces when, as a young man, he lived in Italy. The attention to detail and meticulous representations in pencil sketches, lithographs and woodcuts were fantastic - quite how long he must have taken to produce them, I have no idea.

In the 1930s, as he left Italy behind and moved back to Holland, via Switzerland and Belgium, his style became more akin to the works we know today: lots of fish, birds, lizards and staircases all morphing into each other and fooling the eye with strange perspectives.

After the war, he further refined his techniques and ended up in discussion with some of the famous mathematicians of the day who were looking into the mathematics of symmetry and tessellations. One of these was Sir Roger Penrose, whom I can remember giving me a lecture when I was a callow undergraduate at Oxford.

All in all a great day out and if you can stand the South Circular, well worth a visit - and the café's good too!

In the evening, we had a meeting of the Club Handicap Committee: this was to discuss the impending Annual Handicap Reviews to ensure all on the same page, as well as to think a little about the introduction of the new rules planned for 1st March 2016... watch this space...