Reflection could demonstrate dualities of the conscious and unconscious world, reality and fantasy, truth and falsehood, and, ultimately, conflicting spatial points of view. Here Escher uses 3 dimensional illusion on the 2 dimensional plane to create double exposures of time and space. We feel a sense of loneliness in much of Escher's art because he expresses his own alienation. We can define it as a closed shape or polygon that repeats on all sides without leaving any gaps. In this case we will deal exclusively with the 2-dimensional plane.
Translation is the most basic motion of tessellation.
Certain shapes naturally create translating tesselations. For instance, squares, triangles, parallelograms and hexagrams all tessellate. Escher made slight changes to these tessellating shapes until they became recognizable forms. Let's first begin by modifying a simple parallelogram in translation. The process is broken down into four steps in figure 5-86.