A Japanese Life

I am already a very classy kind of guy. Posh, sophisticated, and suave. That’s me in a nutshell. Unfathomable as it is, since coming to Japan I have become even more so. With every bite of rice I take, every shred of seaweed I consume, the classiness that I embody seems to multiply exponentially.

*BURP*

To let such gross and utter sophistication go dormant would be a waste the likes of the world has never seen. So, to stretch the legs of my oh-so-refined self, Burger, a Japanese friend of ours, and I went to the Oita Art Museum to check out the M.C. Escher exhibit that opened earlier this month.

*PICKS NOSE*

I have been a fan of Escher since looking at a coffee table book of his works that my uncle gave to my sister some 10 or so years ago. Escher’s primary medium was lithography. A quick looksy at my dictionary tells me that lithography is “the process of printing from a flat surface treated so as to repel the ink except where it is required for printing.” Classy though I may be, I’m not sure exactly what that means. However, the process is not of concern here, only the results, which, as you will see below, are amazing. Seeing his art in books and on calendars and what not is nothing compared to seeing the real thing. The detail with which these prints were made is unbelievable; his self-portraits look like photographs and are drawn with excruciating realism down to the last eyebrow. His creative genius is without compare. Or at least not a lot of it. You could lock the average person in a room for 7,000 and some odd years and they would never be able to think up anything even close to what this man has drawn. Anyhow, without further ado, let’s take a short (but of course classy) tour of the exhibit’s highlights:

*SCRATCH SCRATCH*