Probably nicer inside

This one's pretty bleak. I can't decide if it's depressing, or if it just makes me want to eat chowder.

untitled [dismal view]

Peering out through murk (or in?)

I suppose this is a continuation of my series of windows. Although on closer examination, these may actually turn out to be some other sort of optical device.

untitled [fractured portholes]

Also stripes

An experiment with color and lighting. The base formula is a Nova Julia, and I'm finding it difficult; it's hard to decide where to focus, and all the compositions I've tried seem either unbalanced or cluttered or both. There's sort of a vanishing point thing happening in this one, which is maybe okay.

untitled [sepia sawtooth]

A pair of portraits

I think I've been tinkering with these two images, off and on, since September. I'm still not quite sure if they're done yet, but they're definitely getting close.

Mr. Edison



Mr. Tesla



Both use the ploom formula as a base, and both have similar coloring methods applied.

Another window

Another window. I like how cold the light is in this one.

untitled [airscape 2]

Craving light

A window to look out of, with nicer light outside than there is out any of the real windows I've been near lately. I'm impatient for spring to happen.

Making fractal landscapes is harder than I might have expected. I've been trying to stick to just fractal formulas, and not use things like mapping-onto-a-plane, so the trick is to find an area with vaguely horizontal shapes, and then try to color it in such a way that there's a clear dividing line between land and sky.

untitled [airscape]



The window is a variation of something originally done (I think) by Gilles Nadeau.

More input

I'm all uninspired and blah lately. I think what I probably need is something new, something outside my usual tiny orbit of school and home and the occasional grocery run. I will have to think about what kinds of sensory information would be interesting or useful.

Ear, Nose & Throat



A visit to the conservatory, to see if some greenery might be available at this grey time of year? Some new music to listen to? Chocolate?

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.

Burning down/out ?

The fall semester is over, hooray. I started this term with the idea that I would try to incorporate some fractals into the things I was doing at school, and did, in some small ways, succeed at this. But somehow I'm still unhappy about the whole question of fractals, and I still haven't quite put my finger on why.

They do always have a certain sameness, and that's part of my dissatisfaction. But I think the real difficulty is larger and wider-ranging and also more nebulous than the simple fact of fractals being computer-generated and therefore predictable. There's the question of what they mean. Are they abstract? Well, not exactly. They're a completely accurate picture of a very complicated and tedious bit of math. Even if I were to post-process the original image, all the filters are still algorithmic in nature, so the end product is a sort of insanely complicated and glorified graph. These I find pleasing (sometimes), but they're tough to explain to an audience of math-phobic or math-bored artists, or to the general public.

Then there's the larger question of whether art even has to mean something. I don't have a good answer for that one. Not even a definite personal philosophy, really. I could argue it either way.

A lot of the fractals I make are pretty, too. Hell, a lot of the non-fractal art I make is pretty. One of my final critiques this semester was that the installation I'd made looked like it could be a Christmas decoration. Pretty still seems to be a bad word in the current art scene. Or maybe it's just at my school. In any case, it leaves me at a certain disadvantage. I'm not much interested in the sentimental kinds of prettiness associated with, say, Disney or Hallmark, but I definitely prefer harmonious color combinations to harsh jarring ones. I like subtlety. I'd rather be calmed or inspired by art than confronted with hostility. And all of that stuff shows up in the things I make. I hope for strength in my work, but not brute force.

Now that I think about it, maybe it's the brute force aspect of fractals I do dislike. All those calculations are right there in your face, reminding you that you're not a computer or rendering engine, but just another human being trying to make sense of the world.

For the Solstice, I made a cake shaped like a Yule log. Tonight, I've made a fractal that looks like the burnt remains.

Embers



I'm almost tempted to call my semester's experiment a failure, and decide that I'm just done with fractals. Let them go, let them be simply a part of my past. But maybe there's something more I need to try. I will have to consider the possibilities, before the new semester starts.

Mechanical people parts, for reasons of my own

Just a more-or-less abstract, to give my brain a break. School has two weeks to go, and I'm pretty much completely burned out by now.

The Robot's Spine



Five layers, very much in my usual style, trying no experiments, breaking no new ground. And hopefully, not needing to brace myself for any critiques.

Back off, peppermint-breath

Ahh, Thanksgiving is over, and now we're into the downhill slide of the year, when the world fills up with horrible plastic things that light up, or inflate, or blink, or play canned music at you incessantly, all with the intention of forcing you to experience some kind of artificial cheer. It's as though the year was some sort of elderly and formerly dignified relative, who upon reaching a certain advanced age, begins to wear hideous red-and-green plaid pants and maybe a revolving bow tie, and who tends to burst into loud embarrassing song at inappropriate moments.

It's disappointing, when the season itself has so much potential, so many evergreen symbols of rebirth and hope and new light in this dark time. Winter seems like a good time for rest and quiet contemplation, and I hate to see it get all clogged up with manic enforced jolliness.

Ah well.

Another Year Down the Christmas-Hole

Golden rectangles, in blue

Not exactly fractal, but I've been working on a series of etchings that's definitely mathematical. Seven square plates, sized by Fibonacci numbers, etched with lines tangent to a curve. Printed all together, they make a rectangle 13" x 21", and the effect can change depending on how they're oriented.

untitled (blue prints I & II)



I also quite liked the initial proof I did of the plates before they'd had anything etched onto them at all. It made a print of squares embossed into the surface of the paper. Very minimalist.

Kitsch

I took my previous snow image, and pushed it over some kind of edge. It's well on its way to being another one of those pictures I want to hide in a deep file on my computer and never acknowledge again. I'm not really sure why that is, except that it has that too-slick, cartoonish quality that computer-generated graphics nearly always seem to have. Ultra Fractal has ways of adding noise and grit and texture to the base fractal, and I've used some of them a bit, but adding very much of that kind of texture mostly just makes the thing look like it's had a few too many Photoshop filters applied.

It may partly be a question of there not being enough variation in color, and that the variation there is is too regular and predictable. I've spent the last couple of months looking at mixed inks and paper in the real world, and have gotten used to the roughness and irregularity that comes with a physical presence.

Still, in terms of technical assembly and lighting effects, this one is getting close to done.

Snowglobe



An awful lot of layers, starting with a couple of 3-D quaternions as slightly surreal landscape elements. Heavy use of orbit traps for shading and highlighting and general effects, and more masking and transformations than I really want to think about at the moment.

Imaginary weather

The time change happened today, and now I'm going to be all out of whack for a week until I adjust. I'm sad that it gets dark so early, but maybe there will be enough light in the morning that I will stop sleeping through my alarm.

I always start to think about snow around now. I'm living in a place that doesn't get any, most years, but I grew up with snowy winters and so I still somehow expect it. But I will sit in the cool rain, and make fractal snow instead.

Snowstorm



A Julia set. Nothing too complicated. The snowflakes are faulty, of course, because they're all the same.

More prints

Than you can shake a stick at. We had our midterm critique today, and it seemed to go very well. I had made all my printing plates and blocks the same size, 9" x 7", so they could be stacked up the same way I'd normally stack layers digitally. There were an awful lot of possible combinations. I've ended up with more than a dozen variations, three of which I put up in class today. Here they are:

Insomnia: Unresolved Conflict



This one looks the most traditionally "fractal," with iteration banding and a black background. It's a two-stage reductive woodcut on Canson Mi-Teintes paper.

Insomnia: Fever Ache



The second stage of the woodcut, printed on top of a photo-etch plate, printed on top of a larger monoprint.

Insomnia: Lucid Dream



Two fractal plates, one photo-etch and one hardground, plus a floating element from a third (aquatint) plate, done using a clever sort of not-exactly-collage technique which our teacher showed us. It's all printed on a single surface of paper. I have all sorts of plans for more things I want to do with this method, layering bits on top of other bits.