December 2025
"Kaleidoscopes" explores what happens when a simple set of shapes is reflected many times about the center of the canvas. When I was a kid, I had a kaleidoscope collection...I loved how the entire pattern changed with just a slight twist of the tube.
The process to create these was simple enough. The building block of this piece is a collection of multiple triangles, arranged in a spiral. They each were pointed toward a common center but grew larger as they were rotated, like the shell of a sea snail. This demonstrated weak radial symmetry -- the triangles were all congruent but scaled differently -- and then the repetition of this spiral about the center of the canvas provided the strong radial symmetry.
Another piece of mine featuring radial symmetry is Ribbons.
Turns out real kaleidoscopes demonstrate 6-sided (hexagonal) symmetry, which I discovered only after I had completed all of my pieces. My pieces didn't follow this rule; some had 4-sided symmetry (#2) all the way up to 15-sided (#4).