IN THIS ESSAY
A swallow and a fish appear to belong to opposite worlds. One cuts through the air; the other moves beneath the surface. But look at the outline of a wing, the taper of a body, the split of a tail. The separation begins to feel less certain.
That resemblance sent me back to Escher. What I expected to be a study of his finished images turned into something much more involved. We worked through seven sources, moving between finished prints, preparatory drawings and accounts of his methods. I began noticing the work hidden inside what had first looked effortless.
An edge doesn't merely describe one bird; in a tessellation, it also has to accommodate the creature next to it. A wing has to remain a wing even when the space around it is doing something entirely different. The more I looked, the less this felt like a trick of the eye and the more it felt like a series of exceptionally careful drawing decisions.
That changed the question I wanted to ask of our own images. I wasn't interested in recreating an Escher print. I wanted to take one small resemblance between two animals and see where it led. Could a wing become a fin without losing its rhythm? Could a succession of figures do the work of transformation? And what would happen if we freed them from the pattern altogether?
We began with a pattern. The sea came later.
01 / The pattern
The first plate is a dense field of ivory forms against deep navy. On the left, swallows appear in repeating rows, their wings stretched across the picture. Move to the right and their shapes begin to shift. Bodies thicken. Feathered edges take on the sweep of fins. Beaks soften into fish mouths; scales and round eyes gradually take over.
What interests me most isn't the swallow at one end or the fish at the other. It's the awkward territory in between, where the creatures haven't quite decided what they are. A wing and a fin can occupy almost the same shape. Some of the intermediate figures are difficult to identify in isolation, but placed in sequence they make complete sense.
Repetition does much of the work. Each figure prepares your eye for the next, so the transformation feels gradual rather than sudden. You read across the image almost as you would a sentence, one form changing the meaning of the one beside it.
I liked the directness of that approach. There is no sky, ocean or scenery to explain the relationship. The creatures themselves have to carry it.
LOOK CLOSER
But the image also exposed an important distinction. It has the appearance and rhythm of a tessellation, yet we haven't demonstrated that every silhouette interlocks as an exact, repeatable tile. Escher's approach demanded more than a convincing pattern; the geometry beneath the drawing had to work, too. Our plate was an exploration of that visual language, not a mathematical solution.
That distinction didn't diminish the image for me. If anything, it made the next question more interesting. What if we stopped asking the figures to fill a plane and gave them an entire world to move through?
02 / Into the current
The second plate is almost the opposite of the first. Instead of an ordered field, there is a restless seascape. Swallows sweep across a cloud-filled sky. Below them, fish travel through enormous curling waves. The composition has a sense of movement that seems to pull everything in the same direction.
The visual connections are everywhere once you begin looking for them. A wing follows the arc of a wave. Forked tails recur above and below the surface. The pale gold of the feathers reappears in the foam and the fins, while the blues move between cloud, water and scales. Fine, engraved-looking lines give the different materials a shared texture without making them identical.
At first glance, you could read this as two worlds held together by movement. But look more closely at the last airborne creature on the right.
Its head still reads as a bird's, yet the body is already becoming something else. Scale-like markings appear; the familiar sweep of the wing begins to suggest a fin. It is not merely flying above the fish. The transformation has entered the creature itself.
That detail matters. The waves establish the visual current, but the bird–fish hybrid gives the image its turning point. In the first plate, we follow the change across a series of repeated figures. Here, part of that journey is compressed into one body, suspended between sky and sea.
LOOK CLOSER
I find the two approaches interesting for different reasons. The tessellation is more deliberate, almost methodical: it asks you to compare shapes. The engraved plate is more immersive. You notice the landscape first, the movement next, and then discover that one of the creatures isn't entirely what you thought it was.
More than an Escher effect
Working through Escher's prints and studies made me appreciate the difference between a clever visual resemblance and a carefully constructed transformation. Mathematics was part of his language, but so were observation, anatomy and the patience to keep adjusting a form until it worked both as a recognizable creature and as part of a larger structure.
These two plates don't claim that level of geometric resolution. Nor are they physical engravings; the linework is a digital interpretation of that tradition. But they gave us a way to put some of those ideas into practice, to see what held up visually, and to recognize where resemblance was doing the work that structure would otherwise have to do.
More importantly, the second image did not replace the first. It grew out of it. The repeated forms helped establish a relationship between wings and fins. The seascape carried that relationship into a more expansive composition, without losing the moment of change that started the experiment.
Between air and water
Looking at the plates together now, I like that they don't arrive at the same answer. One relies on rhythm and repetition. The other uses atmosphere, movement and a single creature caught somewhere between two identities.
Both began with a small observation: that a swallow and a fish, for all their differences, share enough of a visual language to make one becoming the other feel possible.
The first image asks you to find the moment a bird becomes a fish. The second makes it difficult to say exactly where that moment begins.
Artwork and influence note
Original digital visual studies developed with generative image tools and creative direction through Twain Studio / MFCMF, November 2026. Inspired by research into M. C. Escher's approaches to metamorphosis, figure–ground relationships and the division of the plane. These are not Escher reproductions, physical engravings or mathematically verified tessellations. No affiliation with the Escher estate or related institutions is implied.
