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Spring
Semester 1998 Vol. 9, No. 3
ESCHER
BOWL
JIM McNeill
The Art
Action abounds throughout Escher Bowl as members of two opposing
football teams block and tackle across a shallow playing field. Clusters
of players push into each other, pumping arms and grimacing as they participate
in this contemporary form of urban battle. In the center of the field,
framed by the surrounding action, two players--one from each team—face
each other in a skirmish for the football.
The red player protectively bends over the football to cradle it while simultaneously his stiff right arm punches up into the blue team player. The posture and facial expression of the blue player show that he reacts to the hit with surprise. His eyes are opened wide, the palm and all of the fingers on his right hand are fully exposed, unlike all the other players whose eyes are squinted and whose hands are in fists.
As the drama unfolds at midpoint in the image, the playing field itself acts as a gridded, smooth backdrop for the tumbling action. Divided predominately into four vertical sections by white yardage markings, the shallow green field provides a sharp contrast to the bright colors of the players’ uniforms. Encircling and offsetting the two central characters, the green areas create a focal point that highlights the most important action. Upon closer observation, four negative green shapes define the playing field. These green shapes, or "field pieces" as McNeill calls them, are the same repeating silhouettes as those that are used to outline individual players, or "figure pieces." The field pieces serve as the background plane while the figure pieces all occupy the same foreground plane (in math, a plane is a two-dimensional, flat surface that is infinite).
The Artist
| Born
in 1967 in Rahway, New Jersey, graphic artist Jim McNeill grew up
in Edison, New Jersey, and began drawing before he entered kindergarten.
Using the backs of his father’s old business stationery, McNeill
began to draw at about the age of three. He has continued to draw
throughout his life, although he is quick to add that he has upgraded
to better art supplies than those with which he began as a young boy.
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Among the first artistic influences upon McNeill were classic 1940s Warner Brothers cartoons that he watched every morning on television. After watching the cartoon shows, McNeill would attempt to draw the characters he had just seen. All through his childhood, McNeill continued to draw. He drew not only cartoons, but also often copied images from movie posters and album covers. In 1990 McNeill graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from The School of Visual Arts in New York City. While he attended The School of Visual Arts, McNeill majored in illustration and concentrated upon oil painting as his primary medium. After graduation, McNeill worked as a graphic artist for a small New York magazine. It was while working for the magazine that the artist was first introduced to the Apple Macintosh computer and desktop publishing. Soon mastering electronic illustration, McNeill compiled a portfolio and began a career as a freelance artist.
As a freelance artist, McNeill became intrigued by the ability for computers "to treat lines and shapes as independent, free-standing objects that could be cloned and repositioned with a couple of mouse clicks." To McNeill’s way of thinking, the computer’s ability to duplicate lines and shapes seemed to echo the concepts found within the graphic work of Dutch artist M.C. Escher. The conceptual similarities between his own ideas and those of Escher led McNeill to create a series of computer-generated tessellations. Escher Bowl is from this series. Besides tessellated designs, McNeill continues to work as a graphic designer and has written and illustrated a book for children entitled Dream Patrol.
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