Bridges 2025 Exhibition of Mathematical Art, Craft, and Design

Jonas von Grumbkow

Artists

Jonas von Grumbkow

Illustrator

Krefeld, Germany

info@jvg-illustration.de

https://www.jvg-illustration.de

Statement

During my studies in design I began to interest myself in M. C. Escher's art of the regular division of the plane. After several years of repeatedly coming back to this topic, my attention was finally directed toward Doris Schattschneider's book “Visions of Symmetry”, wherein I found Escher's own theory laid out in his sketchbooks. I carefully copied his examples into my own sketchbooks, in order to understand them. In my own work, I now strive to combine the regular division of the plane with the art of visual storytelling. Since I love comics and sequential art, I wish to tell stories involving the magic of geometry.

Artworks

Image for entry 'A Geometrical Breakthrough'

A Geometrical Breakthrough

40.0 x 30.0 cm

Ink and gouache on watercolour paper

2025

On this comic page, a wizard is faced with a magical barrier and has already begun to deal with it. He does so by dissolving the barrier plane into a pattern of my own design, and subsequently letting the bird motifs come to life. I wanted the birds to fly away in opposite directions, so I devised a pattern that belongs to system IV B in M. C. Escher's notation. It was clear from the overview he provided of his “layman's theory” that such a pattern would fulfil my requirements. In order to show the barrier from an angle in the second panel, I also constructed a perspective view of the pattern from a higher vantage point: The imaginary camera looks down on the scene from a height of 2,1 meters.