Sunday, July 6, 2008

Tessellations of David Bailey

M.C. Escher was the first, who used figures of birds, fishes, lizards and other animals for artistic regular plane division. Many followers then created numerous tessellation images.

One of them is artist from England David Bailey. He creates his images in pen and watercolour.

The main motifs of his tessellations are birds.


The more complex constructions come in, when two distinct motifs are used in conjunction with each other.



Besides usual animals David Bailey uses imaginary creatures to create his wonderful artworks. Below you can see dinosaur-like creatures. The main distinguishing feature of this drawing is that only part of the image was used for animals, when other space shows only borders of elementary tiles. It helps to better understand, which kind of symmetry was used in every case.

Also he created several artworks, which reminds Escher's artworks with mutable tessellations like Metamorphoses. The image below shows the same process as in Escher's lithograph Development I. But David Bailey used birds as motif for his artwork instead of Escher's lizards.



The reverse process is shown in the image below.
More images by David Bailey you see at his personal site http://www.tess-elation.co.uk/. Besides this you you read some articles about tessellation art and Escher's artworks.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

that's really cute..wish i had one too.

Anonymous said...

To the author of this blog,I appreciate your effort in this topic.

EeHai said...

Tessellations wasn't in my maths syllabus when I was schooling back. I noticed it popping up recently. It impressed me. The graphics and the ability to create one is one wonderful topics students (kids) like, and me too. It deviates away from the numerical calculation, and makes maths learning interesting. It also transforms this mathematical topic to art which make it real-life in application. Great tessellation, and post.

maths is interesting!

Anything Gorgeous

Cédric Gommes said...

I wonder whether this type of Escher-like tesselation can be done based on a Penrose tiling.