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.