This is one of my most popular drawings. It took approximately 200 hours to complete, including preliminary sketches, planning, and rendering. It was drawn completely by hand in pen & ink, then shaded with pencil. This is one of the few pieces in which I combined the two mediums.

The idea for this drawing came from one of my first tessellations The Monks. The stone structure is pure "visual fiction" which came from my imagination.

The subject matter is a symbolic representation of "good" and "evil". M.C. Escher wrote, "... no image, no form, not even a shade or color, "exists" on it's own; that among everything that's visually observable, we can refer only to relationships and to contrasts." The same is true not only in visual form, but in all forms, such as "love & hate", "night & day", or "hot & cold". This work is a depiction of "good" and "evil" and how they are different, yet the same. Pay special attention to "the meeting place" in the center of the drawing...where the monks merge and turn into the pillars and the doorways. This is where they cannot exist without each other. It's also where it becomes clear that "good" is the walls and the pillars that support the system, and the "evil" is nothing but the empty spaces in between.

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