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Updated 3/19/2013 Welcome to Ozbird.net! This website is about my art, which is the art of figurative tiles and the tilings that can be made with them. Figurative tiles have a "figure", or a recognizable outline, and they fit together without gaps or overlaps as jigsaw puzzle pieces do.
The Big Gallery, now contains some 62
different tilings of the ever-repeating sort to which M.C. Escher
devoted himself. In no other culture in the world, prehistoric, recent,
or modern,is there any evidence of an anticipation of Escher’s
talent for tiling the plane with figurative shapes. Kolomann Moser’s “Trout Dance”, and a few other less successful designs of his, (even the “trout”, though graceful, have chin fins!), done from about 1899 to 1902, and published while he taught at the Vienna School of Decorative Arts, were, along with the aforesaid Cretan octopuses, Escher’s only real antecedents in figurative tilings of the plane. Moser’s work is thought to have been available to Escher and to have been his initial inspiration to develop and pioneer this art of figurative tilings, or amphography. (Amphography is drawing, (-graph-), different parts of the same figure with both, (amph-), sides of one’s line. Think about it. The word describes what you do when you create a figurative tile. I formerly put out, for a short time, a newsletter entitled “The Amphographer”.) Later on, Escher gained further inspiration through his acquaintance with both Professor Roger Penrose and with Penrose’s father, (who was also a Prof. Penrose). Escher’s very last tiling, done when he was terminally ill, he called “my little ghosties.” Penrose had visited him and shown him an interesting geometry, asking that Escher perhaps create a figurative tiling based on it. Escher did so, creating his fairy-shrimp-like “little ghosties. These tiles fit together along with their mirror images in more than one way to form a periodic tiling of an interesting sort , and one that was unlike any Escher had done before. Nevertheless, that one periodic, (ever-repeating), tiling is the only way they can tile. They, in turn, inspired my own Ghosts, as seen set in slate in the Big Gallery. There are,however, figurative tilings whose tiling
capabilities go beyond anything Escher ever attempted. By modifying the
geometry underlying Escher’s “Ghosties”, one can make
a type of figurative tile, or tile set, that is capable of infinitely
varied tilings. My Penrose Gallery and my Variable Tilings Gallery, contain examples of this
sort, and several other sorts of
It was several years after Escher’s death in 1972 that
Roger Penrose patented his “obligatorily non-periodic” dart
/ kite set and two rhombuses set, along with his figurative chickens
based on the dart / kite set. If you have any questions about tessellations, artwork, or just want to comment on the website send me an e-mail, I'd love to hear from you! |
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©2001 John A.L. Osborn. Please point all links directly to Ozbird.net. You may distribute images found on this site freely, but please attribute all to John A.L. Osborn. None of the art on this site may be sold without the permission of John Osborn. | |||
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