Wednesday, December 31, 2008

Tessellations: Art? Mathematics? Trivia?

All three, perhaps. Or only the last?

Anyway the best of tessellations are eternally very pleasing, from all perspectives.
Many people say they are their favourite artform, (but quite a few people are too easily pleased.)

It seems a pity that so few people have done very good examples of animalesque tessellations. Escher first, of course, did a few really good ones - Sea-Horses, Birds, Fishes, Bull-Dogs, Horsemen - but even in his case, most of his designs are heavily stylized creatures or even grotesqueries: not my cup of tea. I like animals which look as much like the real thing as possible, flying Unicorns and fanciful Demons don't interest me.

One thing Escher didn't do though was to tessellate just a part of a creature, e.g. a Cat's head, and call it a Cat tessellation. I don't think much of this sort of pattern, so typical of many to be found on the www. Escher's designs were always whole creatures, and so if I might mention it are my own, in fact I would not dream of displaying amputational tessellations.

A third class of tessellation which I don't esteem very highly are designs in which the repeating shapes are little more than amoebic blobs which are then internally embellished with limbs and other bodily features to create the animal-appearance. (Eyes, though, are universally necessary, after all they are always internalised, unlike say tails or ears or legs.) My demands on my own designs are that the repeating shapes themselves define the creatures concerned, so any one piece may stand alone as what it's supposed to look like.

So there's three "filters" for what I reckon are truly worthy tessellations: real creatures, whole creatures, self-defined creatures. These filters are not matters of opinion, but manifestly relate to real aspects of the designs: either the patterns pass or they don't. I care only marginally about the quality of the surface decoration, though I acknowledge the use of airbrush and other techniques in improving the eye appeal of patterns: it's the outline that is the main consideration, the rest is window-dressing.

Several wwwebsites display collections of other people's tessellations. Andrew Crompton in England and Patrick Snels in Holland both maintain extensive galleries of adults' designs, while worldofescher in the USA runs an ongoing competition which is mostly frequented by children, and American children at that. Sorry if that last bit sounds putdownish, but if the filters as detailed above are applied to the children's efforts almost all would fail. The reasons for this are twofold: One, decent designs are devilish difficult to do, and two, the kids' teachers in the USA seem to lead them to approach the drafting of patterns from what I think is the wrong end: first the youngsters are told to draw random tessellating blobs, then to try to find suggestions of animalesque shapes within those blobs and to embellish them to try to play up the animal appearance. The result is that the "Hall of Fame" examples are mostly pretty forgettable. Truth.

Andrew and Patrick have been collecting tessellation art for years, and I thank them both for their efforts in bringing post-Escher tessellators to the public. It appears that between them they show examples from most of the "serious" adult tessellators. Sadly, I must insist that the filtering process would remove most of the designs from the top eschelons of Escheresquerie.

Why am I so hard to please? I hear you cry. Because I am! Because I really truly ADORE tessellations, I'm obsessive if you like, but I can't help feeling that the plethora of inferior designs swamping the Websites devalues the experience of trawling them.

Sunday, December 28, 2008

Tessellations, a la Escher

Amongst other pursuits I have managed to devise quite a number of animalesque tessellations some of which are very pleasing. (I received a lot of help from Kangaroos, which I adore, having raised joeys.) Platypus, Cockatoos, Leafy Sea-Dragons, Elephants, Big Cats and lots of other things gave me a hand too. Tessellation really just means tiling, (as in floors). At its simplest it is an invention which almost certainly and necessarily pre-dates the wheel. It's also described by Mathematicians as 'the regular division of the plane', for which reason I labored to make a Plane-tree leaf tessellation, both the pun and the design are quite 'nice' too in the true meaning of the word. When I emailed a copy to Jill Britton of Canada, who runs a wonderful educational website, I failed to mention that it was supposed to be a Plane-tree leaf, I just said Here's my new tessellation Jill, and she replied next day that she loved the Maple Leaf tessellation! Well if it makes a clever Canuk gal happy I'm not about to disabuse her. Anyway you may find many of my designs at www.ozzigami.com.au where you may also see some of my other stuff. Enjoy the trip! To view many more from other artists as well as me look at Dutchman Patrick Snels' website, one quick way to find his gallery is just to Google the words tessellations knights . My own 'Big Game' is well out in front as No.1 in the list, I'm a bit tickled about that even though it's far from my favourite amongst my designs. There's also quite a few of my others scattered through his site, including my own favourite, Two-Roos. Well worth the trip if you like the work of MC Escher !

Saturday, December 27, 2008

Julia Gillard, my fave rave Ranga !

About Julia Gillard. I'm a ranga myself, and sort of proud, well I mean I didn't make my own genetic makeup, just as Julia Gillard and Pauline Hanson and QE 1 and Cameron Ling didn't, but I'm sure not ashamed either. In the absence of other considerations - like poor ignorant Pauline's misguided bigotry, cynically encouraged by Howard and his goons - I love redheads fraternally and see them a bit as Us-against-the-World. People who despise us, envy us, abuse us in their own colorist ways can burn their eyes on us, suck eggs you drongos. As for Julia, I delight in the fact that she is not only articulate, clever and humorous, that she is manifestly mistress of all her huge jobs, that she is hard as nails, that she is at least the best most devastating Parliamentary performer since Keating, (and for mine funnier and more ideologically magnetic too), and a fellow Croweater to boot, as well as all that she happens also to be cute, beautiful, smiley, vivacious, and a full-on ranga! I wouldn't care much if she looked like Monica Attard, (no offence Monica, all Australia is in your debt for your nous, you are one of the best pundits ever); Julia or Monica or you, O Neanderthal Cameron Ling, it's not your looks that really count, it's the way you do your jobs, you're all brilliant. But the kicker is, in an Australia where there are so many such creeps, women included, as those who slag off women on their physical appearance, I doubt whether Julia would ever have made it as far as she has, her splendid attributes notwithstanding, if it weren't for her comeliness. It doesn't say much for our society, but it says a lot about it.
Go Julia. You are uniquely gifted, and we are collectively in awe of your energy, your wisdom and your wicked wisecracks, as well as your lovely red hair, your magically mobile mouth, and your quick foxy pretty facial expressions. Liberals too, they're hardly game to ask you questions in the House, they know you'll grab their slings and arrows and send them back pronto with verve and accuracy and devastating power and wit. You're really something Julia, and Australians who care about the real issues have great hopes for and expectations of you. The cleverest funniest political comments I have heard in decades are both about the starcrossed and be-Labored Peter Costello. One was the pithy "All tip and no iceberg!" by Paul Keating, the other was by Julia, in the House, on the eve of publication of Costello's memoirs: Gillard in answer to a question revealed that she had visited the website of his publisher, whose motto is, hilariously, "BOOKS WITH SPINE"! Do you reckon Julia had fun with that! She went on to speculate on the menu at the launch of poor Peter's book: "Prawns?" she said, "No spine there . . . " You can just imagine how rightwing bigots such as Ackerman and Bolt feel about her! Tee Hee, you'll do me Julia, I mean that in the nicest possible way. I speak for so many others when I tell you how much I admire you. Our homegrown bite-size Boadicea, you are, our diminutive champion, taking the fight way past the creeps, Howard and Reith and all their ilk, who have so damaged Australia in the past twelve years. The only way they can think of attacking you are just snide and wet and stupid, typical of their side. I delight in their discomfiture as you bore it up 'em. Viva Julia!

Monday, December 22, 2008

Ranga voted Buzz Word of 2008 !

Ranga has been voted Buzz Word of 2008, according to Australian media.
Red Power rules OK!

There's something I want to set straight about this Ranga biz though. We redheads are so used to colourist nicknames, from very babyhood, that it's all water off a duck's back as far as most of us are concerned. There might be a few who are insulted, (diddums!), though personally I think that any redhead who couldn't stand epithets would be in a bad way by the time they're adults. I think Ranga in particular is quite a fun term, especially the way it came to light on Summer Heights High; it's just a relatively small proportion of other, non-rh people who do get really unpleasant about us, and the form their unpleasantness takes, their real nastiness, always surprises me when it rears its very ugly (non-red) head. As if we really were a race apart! We're very ordinary except for our colouring, stereotypes to the contrary are crap, and if we do really have hot tempers it's no wonder, because of all the needling over the years by bigots.

Not that colour discrimination focussing on redheads is unusual, mind: on the very contrary, EVERYBODY including redheads discriminates with relation to us. But the form it usually takes is not like discrimination against black people or Asians, for example: rather it's just that whatever redheads do, even if its just sitting on our hands, we are noticed, not necessarily nor usually deliberately hurtfully, just noticed, marked as it were, just by reason of our noticeability. Example: there you are with your mousy cobbers, innocently chucking rocks through greenhouse windows, out comes the farmer, you all run away, what does the farmer tell the cops? Yeah right, "I didn't recognise any of 'em Constable, but . . . " You know what's coming eh!
And that form of discrimination means that redheads are saddled with living a higher level of hype, for ill or good, all our lives. It can actually be advantageous in some situations: e.g., a Ranga footballer, if he's good, will certainly come to everyone's notice, but if he is having a bad day he will be rubbished mercilessly. You can't get away with nothin' as a redhead, but it can be a positive at times.

But here's the kicker: I've never met a redhead who wanted to change his/her hair colour, but I've seen half a million non-rh people who have dyed their hair red, what does that tell you?

I remember reading many years ago of a survey in the USA which claimed that of all healthy people, (i.e., not counting people who are suffering from something horrible and terminal), the identifiable group with the highest rate of suicide was, yep, redheads. Worse still, we led the field in 4 other major categories: rate of domestic violence, imprisonment, alcoholism, and institutionalized mental illness.

WHY? We're just the same as anyone else, except for getting noticed all the time!

Anyway I'm a Ranga, and proud to be, and Yes I discriminate concerning redheads too, but I must say in my case it's with love and affection, not the dismaying hatred of the few bigots.

Friday, December 19, 2008

Ranga Saga Update

Well I said a little while back that the term Ranga meaning redhead originated here in Australia only recently, the creation of Chris Lilley in the TV phenomenon Summer Heights High. Well it seems the Australia part might be correct, but last week I met an old bloke named William who knew the word 30+ years ago in Broken Hill while he was working there. There can be no doubt he is telling the truth, as I have checked strings on Ranga on the Net and there are another couple of people who also claim to have heeard the term long ago. Amazing. I'm a redhead, I have heard lots of epithetical terms for us but never Ranga before. H'mmm.

Tuesday, December 9, 2008

More about Rangas

Since my long-past last posting (and to my amusement) quite a lot of "Ranga" folklore has surfaced, and all quite suddenly.
For one thing, I found out that it is actually a recent Australian-invented word, having made its debut in Chris Lilley's astounding ABC TV series Summer Heights High (for which he has just won 3 AFI awards.) There is a little redheaded kid, a Year 7 I think, that one of Chris's 3 personae taunts with the term. Today you may buy "Sorry Ranga" T-shirts from the ABC, that's Australian Broadcasting Corporation, not the American ABC.

Then in October the Adelaide Zoo offered free admission to Rangas for the school holidays, in celebration of the first anniversary of the Orangutans' installation there. I went with two full-tariff-paying non-Rangas, (none of us would have gone at all except I was curious about what sort of response there would be to the free offer, so from us the Zoo got two fees instead of none), and what fun it was, grinning Rangas everywhere, one in ten or so instead of one in 90 or so. We shone!

There's more to this Zoo story though, but I'll leave it for another posting.