Questions? Comments? Email me!
Updated 3/19/2013
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!
