Luminous World Photography

For as long as I can remember I've been drawn to the works of M. C. Escher.  I was especially drawn to his conceptual representations of symmetrical patterns in nature and the way he employed theories of regular division in his art.  While his works which featured things like impossible buildings with water flowing upwards, ceilings mingling interchangeably with floors and figures climbing stairs upwards, downwards and upside down were more popular I was drawn to the prints of interlaced fishes, birds, angels or devils.

The concept of symmetry as an ideal in nature and art is an old one.  In his famous drawing, Leonardo Da Vinci modeled his perfect human form, with symmetrical and ideal proportions, after mathematical proportions established by Vitruvius, an ancient Roman architect.  In 1933, the famous Harvard mathematician George David Birkhoff published a mathematical theory of aesthetics which contained formulas he believed could be used to determine the beauty and aesthetic appeal a work of art.  Birkhoff's formula was built on the premise that aesthetic appeal was based primarily upon the relationship between complexity and order (or symmetry). According to Birkhoff, if something is complex, it will be more appealing if it is less symmetrical.  Alternatively, if something is highly-symmetrical, it is better if it is less complex.  The formula seemed to make sense in theory, but his methods were deemed too subjective to be useful.

Current scientific theory holds that humans and other animals have an inherent bias towards symmetry and often use it to gauge beauty and health during mate selection. Sensitivity to symmetry, it seems, is ingrained into our behavior.

The image above originally started as a color image of one of my wife's African Violets.  It is not merely bilaterally symmetrical (two identical halves, top and bottom) as it may first appear, but is in fact a single image which has been repeated four times, each quadrant of the image being identical but rotated or inverted and then tiled together to compose the whole.