​I must admit, my first day was a bit like Arnold’s first day—unaware and lost. I was hired back in the summer of my 16th year as a gullible and green kid. Thankfully there wasn’t a Kurt around that day to jerk my chain, but who knows? He might have been there and I was just too naïve to figure it out.
 
Now that I’m more experienced, I’ve become much more confident and less uptight. In fact, I am so confident that I almost feel sorry for the new guard that has to work with me. Guess who acts like Kurt now?
 

​​Back in November, I went to see “The Worlds of M.C. Escher” an exhibit that ran through January 2016 at the North Carolina Museum of Art. I must say that I’ve always enjoyed viewing art, but not to the extent that I enjoyed Escher’s work. As a kid, whenever taking a field trip to an art museum, I would usually breeze through the gallery without reading the plaques about how the artist created the work or what materials were used. I enjoyed looking at the works of art, whether it was sculpture or paintings but I might move quickly through the gallery without doing a lot of reading or digging for information. For someone who enjoyed drawing as much as I did, I really wasn’t interested in the “how they did it” or the “what inspired them,” until I met Escher.
 
Seeing Escher’s work made me open my eyes in a whole new way in which I couldn’t just run through the gallery. This time I was actually studying. I could definitely have spent more time examining each piece and the process of either etching the woodcuts or applying the paper to limestone in a lithograph, especially the pieces that bend the third dimension. I always liked Geometry, not because it wasn’t difficult for me, but because I already intuitively understood some of the concepts. Escher, on the other hand was a mathematical genius. Escher was able to bend what the eye sees in three dimensions while only using two dimensions. And somehow he makes us believe that it will work. Is your mind blown yet?