Kuiper's Math Art

Statement

Hans Kuiper’s Art for this exhibition is chosen from his early work: the regular division of the plane. Kuiper developed his own tool: a symmetry program called “Spiegelkunstenaar” which means Mirror Artist. Creating images in a regular division of the plane is easy and difficult. It is easy because the computer program does all the work. You just draw a line and the computer instantly draws, that line rotated, mirrored and translated. It is difficult because one has to draw an image which means something. If you have fantasy to recognize figures in clouds you can make your own Escher-like drawing. Just start to draw some lines. Try to recognize something in the image you just drew. Just as you recognize the figures in the clouds. Then improve your image step by step. There is an annoying extra difficulty: when you draw a little dent in your image, somewhere else arises a bump! The surface of the image has a constant value: the surface of the tile in which the plane is divided.

Artworks

Symmetry System PG I created this image in black and white on my Atari ST computer. Later I added the colours with "Spiegelkunstenaar" and added the background with Photopaint. This piece of art was part of the exhibition "Overal is Duckstad" in the Kunsthal in Rotterdam in the year 2000.

Symmetry System P2. The idea for this piece of art came seeing M.C. Escher's drawing with biting phantasy animals (Doglike Lion 1926-1927, page 116 and 286 in the new edition of Doris Schattschneider's Visions of Symmetry) . If they can bite they can kiss as well. Isn't it? And could it be human figures? It took some time to find out the right dimensions of the tile to create enough space for a body. At a certain moment there was a woman with one visible arm and two legs. Then suddenly, I saw an improvement. A small change with a great impact. A women with two arms and one visible (and one hidden) leg.

Symmetry System P3 When I started with this piece of art I chose symmetry system P31M. The result was perfect symmetrical skulls. But a face, and also a skull, is not symmetrical in all details. That is why I finished the image in system P3.