Kaleidoscope: Fractured Joy and Shifting Perspectives

Medium: Mixed Media on Canvas
Size: 4ft x 4ft
Creation Date: 2023
Collection: Ephemeral Atmospheres

Kaleidoscope (2023) is part of my Ephemeral Atmosphere Collection, created as a meditation on the fragile beauty of perception. This 48 x 48 inch mixed media painting — blending epoxy, acrylic, and hand-painted photography — invites the viewer into a dizzying world of layered colors, fractured patterns, and shifting forms.

Inspired by the fleeting wonder of childhood kaleidoscopes, the painting offers a space of vibrant, playful exploration. Geometric shards dance across the surface, overlapping in patterns that refuse stasis. Yet beneath the surface joy lies a subtle undertone of unease — a recognition that the world we see is often fragmented, layered, and never entirely whole.

In its process and rhythm, Kaleidoscope echoes the works of Beatriz Milhazes, whose luminous abstractions weave cultural motifs into dazzling compositions. Like Milhazes, I am drawn to the seduction of pattern and color, yet Kaleidoscope also leans into imperfection and distortion. The work disrupts its own harmony, allowing moments of fracture and dissonance to punctuate the dance of forms.

As part of the Ephemeral Atmosphere Collection, this painting is a meditation on the transient, the layered, and the unstable. It asks the viewer to sit with ambiguity, to delight in shifting perspectives, and to embrace the beauty of what cannot be pinned down or made permanent.