Shut up and eat yer hot dog

Well, hey. It's the cold & bitter end of January, Valentine's Day is coming up, and actually I'm feeling a bit better in some directions. So I will post this one, and then stop thinking about boring many-years-old crap.

View from a Broken Heart



This one's from some time ago, and I can't remember which base formula I used, but there's a whole bunch of Orbit Traps and a certain amount of fiddly color masking.

Where do I go from here?

A new semester has started, and I'm wishing I knew what direction to go. Now is when I need to be thinking about themes and ideas and imagery, and I'm feeling awfully blank. I wish I had a compass and a map, or a set of handy directions.

untitled [navigational instruments]

Also probably influenced by JMW Turner

One of my worst difficulties with fractals is that they've become inextricably connected with a person who traumatized me very badly a couple of years ago. It was great at first—I'd met somebody who really liked the images I was making, and who seemed to connect with them in exactly the way I'd hoped my audiences would. Suddenly I had a muse of my very own, and for at least a year I was amazingly productive. We had all sorts of plans for putting together a portfolio of my work, and taking it around to art galleries to see if they might be interested in the stuff.

Then it all went bad, as so many promising partnerships seem to do. I found out I'd been betrayed, lied to, and generally used. I didn't touch a fractal program for a long time after that, and when I tentatively tried to go back to my old familiar pixel-pushing, I found that the spark had almost entirely died. I probably have a few of those pathetic parameters saved, buried in a hard drive where hopefully no one will bring them to light.

In some ways I've gone on with my life. In other ways I haven't really been able to. I'm still not sure which category the fractals fall into; it would be nice to think that the fractals aren't permanently connected to the pieces of my psyche that got broken then.

So, if I have a New Year's resolution, I suppose it's to keep on keeping on, to try and pursue the images when I'm able, and to remind myself that there was a time before those painful connections were even made, that I loved the patterns of chaos purely for themselves.

Polychroma Trainwreck



The book we made as a portfolio may still exist, for all I know. If it had been in my keeping, I would have destroyed it, but I don't think the circumstances were nearly so unpleasant from the other side's point of view. So it's possible that it's still out there somewhere.