Influences on Seth: MC Escher

It may be not so much that Seth loved the work of MC Escher, but that he felt a kinship with it. Like Escher Seth was a mathematical sort of artist who loved visual puns, a complex kind of symmetry, designs that repeated,
but where the repetitions are not exactly the same.

What Escher termed Symmetry drawings like the ones posted here, Seth used as a jumping board to start thinking about the complex repetitive images that he called Tessellations.
He loved making these things. It was something that he did entirely for himself; he got very little revenue from them: a few posters sold, that's all. However, at the time of his death he was in the midst of negotiations with a fabric manufacturer to do some fabric designs. Another person wanted him to paint some ceramic tiles with a Seth Fisher repeated design. So it is possible that he would have started to do tessellation work that made him some money.

Techworld

Seth loved doing these tessellations. I don't think I have posted this one yet. At the time that he died, he was in the process of negociating with a fabric manufacturer to use his designs for fabric. Wouldn't you love to have a shirt made out of this? Some of the others might be shirts only for the truly wierd.

Robots poster

For a while, Tor.com, publishers of SciFi and fantasy books, had a promotion where they were offering free wallpaper from artists, two new ones a week. I just now looked at their site, and I don't see the wallpaper giveaway, though there is so much on there that maybe I missed it. They asked for permission (which I granted) to use this image of Seth's as one of their giveaways, in high resolution and landscape format. He loved to do these tessellations. This particular one he also made as a very large poster, about 60 x 40 inches, and used at Comic Con in 2004 and 2005 as a visual announcement of his place at the 'Con. We also used it in 2006 when his family and friends took his table there. You can see a little of it in the background of the photo of me on this blog, which was taken at Comic Con 2006.

Ff/Iron Man: Big in Japan 3 page 3

The first image is one of Seth's earliest ideas for tessellations. The image that I posted is just one of the tiles; it would be combined with others to make a repeating pattern. But it's clear that he borrowed it for the sculpture/dwelling that the group finds under the snow in this page. Seth's colors are different from the ones Chris Chuckry did for the comic book, but the art is definitely taken from Seth's other work. He called this image Aztec, and thinking of the human sacrifice that was part of Aztec ritual, this adventure in the Arctic that leads to some strange monster religious cult which included sacrifices of some sort, the Aztec idea must have seemed appropriate. At least that's my reasoning.

Buddha poster

Here is the most ambitious of Seth's tessellation designs. In this one, every tile is different, with abundant details to amuse, bemuse, and enrich even the most micro-oriented viewer of Seth's art. This is the sort of image that someone who has absolutely nothing to do can entertain himself with for hours, looking at each little design, comparing one with the other, and even--if he is so inclined--cutting the poster apart and putting it back together again in a variety of ways.

Acrobats 2

As promised, here is another tile from the Acrobats tessellation poster. I love how the one acrobat is grabbing the back of the pants of another. When you see them all together, it looks as though there should be a top and a bottom, but whichever way you turn the image, it always looks right.

Acrobats

I wanted to post the colored version of the Authority poster that I posted yesterday, but it is too big a file to upload here. So I am putting up something else that I found on Seth's hard drive. This is one segment--or as he put it, one tile--of his Acrobats tessellation poster. I'll put up another one tomorrow. The tiles all fit together, though they are not alike. It is a type of image that he had a fascination with for years. He always thought he wanted to do more with tessellations. In fact, at the time of his death he was working on a deal with a fabric manufacturer and was looking forward to seeing some of his artwork as fabric design.