“Dude, take a deep breath and really look at the landscape below. Don’t panic—you’re not alone, and the world isn’t empty. Exhale slowly… let the smoke drift.”

“Take another sigh and now look at the landscape of the piece below. Feeling better already? You see what I mean, brother? And hey—nice birds, too.”

This is the psychedelic art of a troubled mind. Escher’s bewildering linocuts, woodcuts, wood engravings, and lithographs—full of impossible perspectives and parallel spaces—stem from a deep visual confusion he experienced in his youth. Who knows? It might even have inspired Genesis to write Land of Confusion.

The monotonous grasslands along the Wadden Sea coast possess a stark simplicity. A straight horizon: green below, blue above. White specks in the green are either sheep or swans; white specks in the blue, clouds or seagulls. The green is sliced by ditches—each crossed by a single small dam with a wooden fence.

Here and there, a bright orange triangle rises from the fields: old farmsteads with steep, incomprehensibly high roofs. These farmhouses, too, are stylized and symmetrical. In the gable sits a white ûleboerd—an ‘owl board’—decorated with two swans, stylized and symmetrical once more. It feels as though you have been dropped back into the Viking Age, among their longhouses. And again, at sea, the surface is flat and featureless.

The only anomaly in this stylized emptiness is the gleaming black horse: the Friesian. With its unreasonably high, arched neck, and long mane and tail, it stands in baroque contrast to the landscape—its glossy black body cutting through the calm tones like ink on water. You would almost think the breeders designed it for this very contrast.

This stark, nihilistic landscape was the birthplace of Maurits Cornelis Escher—nicknamed Mauk. He was born in the town of Leeuwarden in 1898. At the age of five, he left the endless grasslands behind. The frail, often sickly Mauk moved first to Arnhem, then later to Delft and Haarlem. The constant upheaval unsettled him, and school became a source of disappointment for his parents. Even in drawing class, his performance was unremarkable—just a 7 out of 10.

Yet from this early visual confusion and disorientation emerged something remarkable: the psychedelic, mind-bending work of M.C. Escher, now famous around the world.

At first, the chic art connoisseurs did not recognize Escher’s work as ‘real’ art. But hey, why should we listen to the profit-hungry owners of art galleries anyway? The hippies in San Francisco, on the other hand, saw the value right away. Escher’s psychedelic imagery became wildly popular in their scene.

Only then did his reputation as an artist take off. Suddenly, art galleries could make money off him—and so they began to praise him. Still, Escher kept complaining those hippies in Frisco reproduced his work without permission, and without paying him a cent. Yeah, he stayed, after all, a man of the North.

Escher travelled across Europe, drawing inspiration from Italy, Switzerland, and Spain. He quite literally gave new perspectives to traditional Dutch culture—a culture still steeped in the smell of butter, smoked eel, cow dung, biweekly public baths, and old cheese. Or worse: young cheese.

He combined the stylized landscape patterns of his youth with the laws—no, the redefinition—of physics and mathematics. Just think of his intricate geometric tile patterns. At long last, after centuries, the Dutch were freed from the tyranny of Delft Blue tiles and ceramics. Finally!

So, if you are planning to hike the Frisia Coast Trail and—like those dudes at the start of this blog post—you struggle with wide open spaces, or even suffer from agoraphobia, take a close look at the work of grown-up Mauk. It is trippy, healing, and strangely reassuring.

His art—though not along the trail—can be found at Escher in the Palace, a fantastic museum housed in a beautiful old palace in the heart of The Hague. No stimulants needed!

Note — This short film including interview with Escher, subtitled in English.

Suggested music

Genesis, Land of Confusion (1986)