“Talent and all that for the most part is nothing but hogwash. Any schoolboy with a little aptitude might very well draw better than I perhaps; but what he most often lacks is the tough yearning for realization, the teeth-grinding obstinacy and saying: even though I know I’m not capable of it, I’m still going to do it.” — M.C. Escher, in a letter to his son Arthur, 12 February 1955
I ran across the quote above while desperately searching the last two days for a way to re-do my logo. I was discussing this with a graphic artist and the idea came about of using the face that currently appears in my logo, but making it look like it was “unwinding.” If you can imagine taking an apple-peeler and peeling and apple, with the peel staying intact and then superimpose a face on that, well, that’s what I’m talking about. So far, I can’t figure out how to do it. I thought I remembered seeing it as an Escher print once, so during a search on “Escher” and “displacement map” (because I think that’s what this would be), I found the quote above.
It perfectly characterizes what I’m trying to do here, too.
Gotta love the irony.
1 response so far ↓
1 Hans DeBartolo // Dec 26, 2005 at 4:24 am
This is so true about determination. I was born very unathletic and if I decided to be an intellectual I might have just coped the “realistic” additude for the time that that I was not built that way. However, I was young and foolish and stubborn–not to mention obsessive. I just kept working out and training, I made it a habit. Long story short–in 8th grade I was a joke in the fitness contest and only did one pull-up (I am using that one area of the contest as an example, since listing every event would prove verbose) Well, I really trained hard in high school and by the time I was a senior at an all guys high school–I got first place in the fitness contest senior year, For the pull-up portion of the contest I did 30. I literally went from being a joke in the fintess contest to having the conductor of the contest refer to me as “Body Beautiful”.
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