Several years ago I watched a show on public television about fractal geometry and how it is all around us in the world.
It was fascinating to me, and opened up another world to me as an artist.
The whole idea of the math of self-similarity, the surprising results of repeated iterations of the same actions at different styles and angles – fascinating! Add color and light, and the whole of Creation becomes illumined as a universe of precise, amazing art.
Many of you who know me on Steem and Hive know my writing and my music and my photography, and the latter is usually the primary way I go into the visual arts.
But, we're on shelter-in-place in California, so I dusted off my “iterator” – Apophysis is my fractal art platform of choice, and got on back to this aspect of my artist life.
I use Apophysis 2.09, which has vast functionality that requires time to really master. I haven't had that kind of time until recently, but again, the theory is simple: repeated actions iterated millions of times at different sizes and angles.
Start in “Linear” mode – the “canvas” is flat and square, and strokes, dots, angles and such operate as they would on a canvas. Although you can start with a blank canvas, Apophysis generates 100 “snapshots” every time you use it, and I saw something in this one...
Apophysis also has a vast palette of color gradients to work with, but that usually is a last step... the first thing I did was tweak the “canvas” so the canvas bowed outward, and then had the program re-iterate the figure around that bulge. That led to this result:
And you can actually see the “bulge” here, with the drawing triangles in the place they needed to be for that...
Next step … after considering that, I wanted to curl the iterations inward again... so, think in terms of straight lines becoming bowed out, and then curled inwards again, within the relationships of an existing figure. Imagine that happening millions of times. Even so much as a tiny tweak, a movement of the triangles, a slight alteration of the shape of the canvas …
This was the result, like a jellyfish and a chandelier had a baby … as if a jellyfish had been fitted to fly and shine in the air.
Color scheme – I left it alone! Even within hundreds of choices and gradients within those choices, this could not have been improved upon!
So, I return with my abundant time to fractal art … this was a happy new beginning!