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Drawing Hands
1948 lithograph by Dutch artist M. C. Escher
Drawing Hands
Drawing Hands is a 1948 lithograph by the Dutch artist M. C. Escher in which two lifelike hands appear to emerge from a flat sheet of paper and draw each other. It is among the best-known works by Escher, and an example of an artwork that appears to go from two dimensions to three, then back to two dimensions—a recurring across Escher's work (such as Reptile). Drawing Hands has gained cultural significance as a metaphor, illustrating concepts of interdependence and paradoxical self-creation. The artwork is discussed in Douglas Hofstadter's book Gödel, Escher, Bach, as an example of a strange loop. It is used in Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs by Harold Abelson and Gerald Jay Sussman as an allegory for the eval and apply functions of programming language interpreters in computer science, which feed each other. Variations of the work replace one of the hands with a robotic hand, presenting a scene in which a human hand and robot hand draw each other and bring one another...
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