Deep in the Mines 1 (2000)

Fractals sometimes transcend their parameters. If they are art — and I’m guessing that most of us think they are — then our images reflect some deeper part of ourselves. Our dreams. Our buried treasures.

Tina got me thinking about this standing on the shoulders of giants business. It’s true that someone built the mine by writing a program or a formula. But the artist still has to take that journey to the underworld and cart back the gold or silver.

It’s a dangerous business. Rooting around under the surface for meaning. Sometimes you strike it rich. Other times what you find blows up in your face.

And there’s no drop dead canary telling you when your image glitters or smells like gas.

Deep in the Mines 2 (2000)

I’ve often used the word spelunking to describe my artistic process. I crawl through images — hauling out dirt, clearing a path to see what still lies ahead. It can be claustrophobic. Sometimes I chip away at one delicate section for hours. Sometimes I thrash around blindly. Even a cave-in is better than finding nothing.

Maybe someone caved or carved out parts of this mine before me. But I’m still the one who has to go down there — again — alone — in the dark.

The classics are filled with treacherous journeys to the underworld where ghosts linger and are haunted by their memories of life. Maybe, like Orpheus, my images will sing, and I’ll return to the light with something I love. Unless I get impatient. Unless I turn around to look at what I’ve made before the trip is finished. We’ve read the story. We know what happens then.

I think fractals can reveal memories from the substratum. They flock around Odysseus at the pit of blood. If you risk going underground, they might settle around you like leaves encircling a tree. Or they might mock you from the safety of the shadows.

They are more than “the cold equations” of Tom Godwin’s moving story. They are like engrams. Brain scans anyone can read.

There’s plenty of uranium deep in the mines. With it, you can see inside yourself.

And see through others, too.

Deep in the Mines 3 (2000)

Mine.

Mind?

Dig still deeper…

Deep in the Mines 4 (2000)

Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night. I have bits of poems or images partially unburied in my head. I’ve learned to get up immediately and start shoveling with my pen or keyboard. If I don’t, those whispers from the Muse will vanish like Eurydice.

Here’s something I wrote in my notebook several years ago in a semi-sleepwalk:

The mine
is darker than
the last thing you
said
to me
ten years ago
today.

Someone probably said something similar before me. Maybe I should have left this lump of coal resting under tons of rock.

But we don’t, do we? We open our notebooks and our programs — and, with dim light pouring from our foreheads, we start digging.

And, sometimes, if we persevere and are lucky, we uncover something.

A nugget pick-axed out of the ore.

A diamond hewn from the darkness of the subconscious.

Rare chunks of art hauled out from deep in the mines into the open air for all to see.

Chump Change (2006)

The way I saw my art changed when I started working with a master printer to make poster-sized Giclees of my own work. I began to see my images on the wall rather than on the screen.

My work habits shifted noticeably. I started creating in the largest sizes my poor computer could tolerate without coughing and crashing. Each new image became a canvas, and my eyes adjusted to looking at sections of a big picture work-in-progress rather than conventional monitor sizes.

And, suddenly, the details and nuances of texture became paramount.

Upper left corner detail of Chump Change

Size became whatever I could muster. Memory became my enemy. My work computer has four gigs of RAM, and I can work at 8000 x 8000 pixels — usually — unless I want to post-process heavily.

And I do — with extreme prejudice — which cuts down my comfort zone closer to around 6000 x 6000 pixels. But I can thrash about in Photoshop or Painter with wild abandon and still layer/render away at a steady clip.

And why post-process? It’s really not for the fractal. After all, it’s already there (or, at least, what’s left of it).

I post-process for the art.

Accusers (2006)

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s go back to the beginning.

I didn’t get into fractals for the math. I took them up because — finally — I saw a way that I could make art.

I’d tried before. I took a beginning art class when I was college. It was a frustrating experience. I couldn’t make my paintings look anything like what I saw in my head. The professor eventually suggested I drop the class — while adding, for good measure and for the benefit of my long-term self-esteem, that I “probably had no talent.”

I know what you’re thinking. Don’t say it.

But the prof was right in one sense. I couldn’t deal with the conventional tools of art. The brush seemed pudgy and awkward. I always felt like I was stabbing the canvas with a cucumber. I never could gage how much or how little paint would produce the desired thickness. Everything dried too fast or dripped too much. And the smell of the chemicals gagged me and made my head feel like a cinder block.

I gave up — and took up writing instead. The pen felt just fine in my hand, and I had an overdose of images already in my head.

Then, one day in 1997, I saw my first fractal on Usenet.

And I’ve been playing with fractals ever since. At first, I just churned ’em out like an assembly line. I was fascinated by how minor adjustments produced subtle changes with each subsequent iteration. Sometimes, I felt more like a machine than the computer itself.

But I slowed down considerably once I began to post-process. I started to labor over images and refused to be satisfied until each was either finished (abandoned?) as the closest approximation of my head shot — or every layer was sent kicking to the Recycle Bin.

And that’s when I realized I’d found a way to begin painting. Fractals became my base canvas. I wasn’t afraid, to the consternation of some, to mess everything up. The fractal forms weren’t sacrosanct to me. Only the final result mattered.

I believe making art is like a knife fight. There are no rules. You either survive the ordeal with something from nothing to show for it. Or your vision dies.

Sorceress (2006)

So, now, I was “painting” regularly, composing more carefully, and doting over textures — at least, those I could see working within a scale of 800 x 600 pixels. Still, I found myself wondering: Am I making art?

And how would I ever know unless I could really see what I was doing?

But, as I said, everything changed after I met with a professional printer and saw my first poster-sized Giclee. I had new improved eyes — and with fresh sight came further adjustments in my process. I worked even more slowly. I realized my early images were like a cup of black coffee. The latter ones became like a tongue-twisting, labor-intensive specialty coffee from Starbucks.

Thinking big is like making the jump to high-definition television. Textures matter. Every pixel shows. And once that mindset took hold, I finally felt like I was thinking like an artist.

I’m glad I worked with a professional printer — an artist himself — because he had the experience and the equipment to make a museum-quality product. Acid free inks and papers make a difference. And although photographic prints are lush and can scale up quite large, I was drawn to the gentler (as in less saturated), smaller Giclees. Surfaces in Giclee are remarkably tactile — with brush strokes evident and raised and indented areas becoming peaks and valleys. And the first time I saw an image printed on canvas and covered with a chemical wash, I knew…

…I knew I was looking at a painting.

A program like Fractal ViZion (which I like, by the way) can produce endless fractals with one mouse click. It doesn’t need us to produce fractals. Besides, nature’s already doing a fine job of churning them out — thank you very much.

And, although I don’t use Ultra Fractal, I think I understand (at least in part) why so many fractalists are drawn to it. The software can produce striking, intricate textures. I know that’s why I was excited to help beta-test XenoDream. It wasn’t for the 3D forms. It was for the incredibly lush and complex textures.

I’m not advocating my way or the highway, you understand. I’m just encapsulating my journey to finding art in fractals.

I do believe fractals can be more than what math wrought.

And much more than decoration.

They can be fine art — and all that goes with it.

So don’t be afraid to paint — whether in-house with UF or XenoDream or outsourced to Photoshop et. al. And don’t shy away from seeing the small screen as the big picture on your wall.

Yes, we have the tools. But we also need to cultivate the vision — along with the talent and patience to bring it into existence.

We put the art in fractal art.

Homage to Andy Warhol (2000)

From artrepublic:

In 1960 Warhol began to replicate a range of mass-produced images, beginning with newspaper advertisements and comic strips before turning to packaging, dollar bills and more. He is probably the most famous member of the Pop Art movement. Virtually any image that was in the public domain was a prime target for the Warhol treatment. In 1962 he had his first one-man show at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles and in the same year exhibited at the Stable Gallery in New York. This was the year of 32 Campbell’s Soup Cans (1961-1962). Soon after his sculptures of Brillo soap pad boxes, Coca-Cola bottles and replications of popular icons such as Elvis Presley, Elizabeth Taylor and most famously Marilyn Monroe were to appear and secure his reputation. The silk-screen process he favoured allowed for infinite replication, and he was opposed to the concept of a work of art as a piece of craftsmanship executed purely for the connoisseur; in Warhol’s own words, “I want everybody to think alike. I think everybody should be a machine.”

Thus Warhol’s work was intent on dehumanising his subjects whether they be images purloined from mass-culture or depictions of atrocities such as car crashes. He turned out his works/products like a manufacturer, going as far as naming his studio The Factory. As well as paintings, he published the long-running celebrity magazine Interview, managed the rock group The Velvet Underground and achieved great notoriety as an underground filmmaker with lengthy films such as Sleep (1963) and Empire (1964). In their silent and almost completely static images Warhol raised monotony to new heights, as he said at the time, “I like boring things.” Andy Warhol has become one of the icons of the 20th Century, putting as much effort into publicising himself as promoting his work. He was finely tuned to the tedium of modern mass-culture, conveying and indeed revelling in the banality of the images proliferating around him. His stance was on the one hand distant and voyeuristic and on the other totally immersed in the culture of spectacle. He was able to both comment upon and completely embrace the materialism of the Sixties. Bernard Levin sums up the essence of Andy Warhol perfectly, “[He was] one-man demonstration of the triumph of publicity over art.”

~/~

Warhol’s aesthetic turned up in a poem I wrote in the mid-1990’s:

Mechanical Drawing

Art is debasing and elitist say
many conservative critics pointing
fingers that never held a brush
at powdered wigs and highback chairs,
at icons drowning in tinted urine,
at showing the body to the public
but Warhol felt that one image
replicates another and puts distance
between creator and object via
machines. Use one model
for a statue then break the mold–
kill her like a pyramid attendant
then sketch the once removed marble
over and over until like endless
photocopies the original blurs
back to blankness. Anyone can
safely understand no statement
at all but art becomes little
more than a camera shooting stills for
a docudrama and in the process
the source is lost. Aesthetics are easy
as paint by numbers then. My curator
is a senator from a new school:
expansive minimalism. Obtain
perspective from a computer poser
and crunch canvases like a series of zeros
and ones. The null set will seldom
offend when the paintings in every
museum are supplanted with mirrors.
Listen to the tour guide and leave your
clothes on. Never look at yourself.