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Hi, I'm John Osborn
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.
Here
you will find about 260 “Escher-like “ tessellations, (figurative
tilings), with more being added as I get around to executing, (in presentable
form), the backlog that exists in my notes and the new ones I’m doing
now. Some of the tilings are made up of variably assemblable figurative
tiles or tile sets such as my set of eight different
beetles, that tile together in an infinite number of different ways.
You’ll also see some of the incredibly varied symmetries of my ten-member
bat and lizard set, my red fish, blue fish, yellow fish set, my four ghosts,
my Ozbirds, and, (not finished yet, but soon to come): my Ozbirds AND
Prairie Dogs tiling together in endless ways. -- And many others: Escher-like
tilings. Penrose tilings. Variable tilings. Even a few whales, (from my
life-before-tilings!), in their own gallery.
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.
Perhaps the Japanese, and certainly the Incas and some other New- World
Amerinds, had a few designs of interlocking serpents and interlocking
long-necked birds in woven friezes or borders. But none of these designs
were capable of being extended in the second dimension to cover the plane,---
except in the same way that lines of my Frieze
Dogs, can be stacked on on another. The only exception that I know
of is an early Cretan, (Minoan), design, traces of which are found on
pottery, showing interlocking six-legged octopuses, -- rather similar
to my “Planarians”, (see page 1 of the Big Gallery).
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 
“variably
assemblable” tiles and tile sets. My orange, yellow, black and white
ghosts in the Variable Gallery are essentially the same tiles as the more
formal set-in-slate ones in the big gallery, but are used, as you see,
in many different tilings. It is remarkable that Escher came so close,
(with the “ghostie” geometry), to tiles capable of variable
assembly, and yet 
never
actually created anything of the sort. Another point at which he came
close, (and this happened much earlier), was with his square-based ants
of 1953. A little modification and he might have devised something similar
in kind to my basic variable bat / lizard set. But he didn’t. See
my Bat and Lizard Gallery.
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. 
These
inspired the Penrose tilings you see here in my Penrose
Gallery. To use these Penrose quasiperiodic sets, (designated the
P2 and the P3 sets by authors Grunbaum and Shephard in their authoritative
text, “Tilings and Patterns”), to do figurative tilings seems
to me about an order of magnitude more difficult than doing ordinary Escher-type
tilings. The only other person I know of who has done quasiperiodic figurative
tilings with the dart kite set is Dr.Robert
Fathauer of Tessellations Co. whose serpent, eagle, scorpion dart
/ kite tiles are most remarkable. He has also done some frog / reptile
P3 Penrose tilings and numerous figurative tilings, (or to use his term:
“recognizable-motif tilings”), of fractal and other sorts more
mathematically recondite than any of mine.
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!
