A sheet of paper is pinned upon a background with four thumbtacks. A right hand, a pencil, sketches a shirtcuff on the paper. It is only a rough sketch, but a little farther to the right a detailed drawing of a left hand emerges from the sleeve, rises from the plane , and comes to life. In its turn this left hand is sketching the cuff from which the right hand emerges.
"Some years after I made this print, I saw exactly the same idea of two hands drawing each other in a book by the famous American cartoonist Saul Steinberg. It was with a great deal of interest that I read the article on 'left-handedness in drawing' .... I was particularly struck by the suggestion that left-handed people might be more inclined to draw than to paint; in other words, that shape might be more important to them than color. As far as I'm concerned, this is perfectly true. I was exclusively left handed from earliest childhood (at primary school I found learning to write with my right hand extremely difficult; I should probably have managed far more easily and naturally writing in mirror image with my left hand), and the fact that my feeling for shapes is greater than that for color may also have resulted in my becoming a graphic artist rather than a painter. ... For a graphic artist who is always working with both an image and a mirror image, being ambidextrous is obviously a great advantage." -- M.C. Escher
