Shayne Decker

Artist Statement

It was the cover of a Scientific American Magazine with the black and white bird tessellation from M.C. Escher's "Day & Night" print that amazed me with how a plane could be tiled with identical shapes and no negative space. But then I was confounded with the realization that all the birds were not identical, as I had assumed. The white birds were not mirror images of their black counterparts. My thinking was that he was cheating (in a game in which I imagined the rules).

So I challenged myself to design a black-and-white bird that could tile a plane with nothing but its own mirror image…a task I thought would be easy. I was wrong. Thus, I was seduced into an obsessive affair with a form that has proven to be, by turns, implacable, taunting, and enormously stimulating.

The more difficult designs are those in which each shape is completely enclosed within opposing similar shapes. Most difficult of all are those that contain recognizable figures rendered in only two (contrasting) colors. These dual figurative plane-filling tessellations serve as the basis for most of my pieces.

My goal is to create pieces in which the aesthetic beauty of the recognizable shape mirrors the conceptual beauty of its underlying mathematics.

About the artist

Shayne Decker has been a practicing artist and freelance graphic designer since graduating with a B.A. in Fine Art from the University of California, Irvine. He currently resides in Silicon Valley.

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