Graphite on paper © 1979 & 2021 Victor Acevedo Victor: In April 1980 I produced the pencil drawing called Four-fold Rotational Wasp. It began as the basis of a gray scale study for my color class with Judith Crook at Art Center College of Design and it was in fact the first complete work of mine that was a direct result of my study of Escher's notebooks the previous Summer. Structured on a 5x7 matrix of squares, this composition was intended to combine three different types of pictorial idioms. These are Surrealist allegorical figuration, non-objective hard-edged geometry and finally Escher-like zoomorphic tessellation. It was seeing and transcribing an insect pattern from Escher's notebooks that inspired me to create the 4-fold rotational wasp. I could have easily emulated the positive and negative figure-ground interchangeability of Escher's zoomorphics, but I felt my work would have seemed too derivative. I decided to adopt a looser and 'open-packed' style. This is also evident in the tessellation study for my painting called Slated Breakfast: Visceral Analytic.   My rationale at the time was based on looking at photographs of groups of parachutists holding hands in mid-air, and noticing the abstract or non-objective interstitial spaces between the figures. You don't see the one-to-one figure-ground toggle. Funnily enough, I did not reference at the time the perennial and ubiquitous use of open arrays and openly linked methods of tiling the plane as seen in textile pattern design, especially in botanical motifs. Escher’s explorations of polyhedra were also very inspiring and interesting to me. There are some great photographs in extent that show him with a vector-edged cube that circumscribes a cuboctahedron that is further subdivided in octahedra and tetrahedra. This model would be right at home amongst some of the modeling in R. Buckminster Fuller’s Synergetic geometry.