Ever since I first saw Reptiles (1943) by the Dutch graphic artist MC Escher, I was entranced. It sums up everything I have known and loved about the relationship between medium and imagination - how a picture or a character can escape from the two-dimensional, have a brief life and then return to their home. Escher described his tesselating pictures as 'the regular division of the plane' and his work is abundantly peppered with variations on the theme. Any mathematician will tell you that the reptiles are little more than tesselating hexagons - hence the three-way repeat pattern and the minimum of three colours needed to fill them in. I didn't think of actually putting them on a car until about 1988 when I had a very badly rusted MG Metro and, since I never watch TV unless I have something better to do, thought it might be a wonderfully useless distraction to paint Reptiles onto the car. (To move to the next step, click HERE.)

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