Surfing Squirrel by Maria K. Lemming

I Know What I Like — Or Do I? Part Three:

I may not always know why I like a given work of art, but I can usually tell when a given piece makes me simultaneously smile and think.

So, I’m on more sure footing on this outing. In the two previous posts, reflecting on work by Jennifer Stewart and Tina Oloyede, I was travelling in dim light without much of a trustworthy, critical GPS. I knew I didn’t much like the road fractal art is currently on: creating beautiful objects for their own sakes and systematizing such empty eyecandy as the apotheosis of fractal art through both Fractalbook high-schoolish clique commentary and the mostly prettified gunk factory-made by "winners" of the Benoit Mandelbrot Fractal Art Contest.

The fractal art I find exciting is often consciously processed in the direction of representation and can, broadly speaking, be "read" as a visual text — usually through the avenues of perceiving a narrative structure or through aesthetics via close scrutiny of how the piece utilizes design elements.

But there’s another puzzle piece crucial to today’s post, and it takes the form of a simple question. Why is fractal art ordinarily so humorless? Seriously. I mean, if it’s not bludgeoning viewers with strum und drang, it’s drably overreaching for profundity by being saddled with befogging titles that sound heavy but are merely an unfathomable or obscure lexicon. This predilection for sobriety and graveness also extends to the work of many new wave 3D fractal artists as well. Why do so many 3D affictionados seem content to staidly rebuild the halls of Montezuma or plumb the mecha-guts of steampunk machinery? Buoy up, boys.

Writer Anne Lamott once noted that "laughter is carbonated holiness." I think it’s time to pop the top and get real gone — somewhere past giggly but just outside spiritual.

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I’ve been a smiling fan of Maria K. Lemming‘s fractal art since I first chanced upon it on Usenet in the late 1990s. No one else currently working in the discipline possesses a comparable and keen sense of recherché whimsicality. If, as Lenny Bruce once claimed, that laughter is "the only honest art form," then Lemming might be our purest genius.

Take Surfing Squirrel above (please!). The addition of a googly eye to the rodent form should come off like digital quackery; our own eyes should roll in response. Instead, the laugh lines around my eyes crater even deeper. The resulting transformation is beyond silly. It’s become somehow archetypal with the staying power and viral qualities of an Internet meme

which, of course, it is (even if the furry dude is technically water-skiing).

While you’re chuckling, you might overlook the precision of the piece’s composition. There’s energy everywhere. Note how the motion lines lift the tail off the board. Note how the waves, resembling the harmonic squiggles of voice recognition software, suggest a capricious sense of shooting the tube. The interwoven white threads in the "wave" evoke the froth of breaking whitecaps. The taut, horizontal lines rippling on the squirrel’s "fur" hint at both speed and tensity. Lastly, the fragmentized frame gives the entire piece a tilt-a-whirl, off-kilter ambiance that insinuates a gnawer wipe out is assuredly imminent.

Shy Sumo Wrestler by Maria K. Lemming

This work begins its rising mirth with the oxymoron of its title. What sport revels more in fleshly close encounters than sumo wrestling? How could any bashful athlete in this particular profession ever be competitive? There’s no hidey holes or panic room on a sumo mat. The two competitors are staggeringly exposed.

And in more ways than one. Those mawashis (the loincloth belts worn by the wrestlers) leave little to the imagination. In fact, the sport enjoys assaulting the eyes with plump, dueling buttocks (now there’s a phrase I don’t think I’ve ever had occasion to use before) and bashing barrel chests. Given the high degree of body friction involved, the image could have easily veered off in a more titillating direction — perhaps something like the erotically-charged work of Karen Jones. But Lemming is more interested in a kind of enamored gleefulness. Her soft, rounded, feminine forms are not intended for arousal but are subtly used to suggest the girth and grace of the wrestlers.

Shy Sumo Wrestler shows that fractal art does not have to be intemperately processed to trigger a leap from abstraction to representation. What we have here is a cubist cut-up of a trial of strength by combat with ancient origins in ritual dance. Remarkably, the piece feels like a still life that’s fully in motion. It’s all backs and butts — guts and belts — beef and brawn. And, what’s most awe-inspiring, is that it’s grounded in the wry notion of one timid warrior misplaced in a world where vulnerability is terra incognita.

Lonely Girl and the Ship by Maria K. Lemming

Lonely Girl, a solitudinarian, who made her first appearance near the turn of the century, may be Lemming’s most enduring achievement — a fractal character who is every(wo)man. She’s endearing because she carries on in the midst of adversity. She’s courageous, faces her fears, and hangs in. But she has no companions to give her good cheer and boost her spirits. In the end, she discovers what we all know but fear to admit: we’re alone. In other words, she’s us.

Lonely Girl is trapped in an absurd existence of being inexplicably transported from one Fringe event to the next. No pattern for her ongoing transferrals is apparent. No explanation is provided as to the purpose of her reoccurring time-slip travels. Worst of all, she is forced to journey solo without the benefit of any comrades. No wonder she’s so lonely.

Here’s Lonely Girl considering a fresh fractal landscape. Zap. Here’s Lonely Girl on a Framed Road. Whoosh. Here’s Lonely Girl incarcerated in a lollipop. Zing. Here, in a personal favorite, is Lonely Girl meeting the New World. Bam. Here’s Lonely Girl confined in the Haunted House. Scared…and, as always, alone.

But the loneliest Lonely Girl of all is Lonely Girl and the Ship. Adrift without a life raft. Forced to tread water with only brots for arms. Doomed to bob atop the waterline while she waits for the welcome companionship of passing sharks. Poor thing. She can’t even go down with the ship. Even drowned company is better than none.

And that dingy, white-yellowish, nuclear flash sky is hardly reassuring. Even worse, the background could be a black hole of digital absence. The grim nothingness of empty pixels. Ultimate solitary.

Yes, Lonely Girl and the Ship would be the most lonesome, most melancholic fractal ever made…except…

…except Lemming, in her artistic wisdom and human kindness, made certain that Lonely Girl will never truly be completely lonely because…

…because you are spending time with her right now. Every viewer becomes her yokefellow.

She has us.

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Next up in the series: Nothing.

Fly Me to the Moon by Tina Oloyede

I Know What I Like — Or Do I? Part One:

Last time, I was on surer footing as I attempted to explain why I know what I like when viewing fractal art. I admitted my bias for the painterly over the photographic, as well as my preference for work that strives to be about something more substantive than attractive decoration.

My complaint with most fractal art is that it cannot generally be "read" — that is, it suggests no levels of meaning beyond being (usually) lovely art for art’s sake. There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with such art, nor do I assume it is necessarily easy to create. It’s just that I find a steady diet of such fractal dulcification eventually leads to a kind of aesthetical diabetes. The preeminence of such eyecandied confections in our community has resulted in what Tim once labeled "the fractal craft guild." If our discipline’s "best artists" have no higher aim than continuing to churn out beautiful but meaningless objects, whether in 2D or 3D, then I fear fractal art will continue to be broadly viewed as fancified kitsch rather than purposeful fine art.

The fact that exhibitions like the Benoit Mandelbrot Fractal Art Contest (BMFAC) further codify the belief that beauty is an end in itself and continue selecting decoration over substance makes the drought of meaningful fractal art linger longer. And never think outside the well-adorned, prettified box on Fractalbook, or you’ll face the likelihood that your comment stream of effusive kudos will shrivel and mummify like a shrunken head.

Naturally, I feel fractal art’s finest practitioners typically strive for a meatier meaning that surpasses ornamentation. But how does one go about "reading" that meaning — especially since visual art, like text, can be read in numerous ways, including through the divergent filters of narration and aesthetics?

I expect to find myself stumbling around in a darkened cave over the next several posts. Why? Sometimes I don’t know why I like certain artworks or artists. There’s a difficult-to-define something in certain works that somehow affects me — that when experiencing them "I feel physically as if the top of my head had been taken off," as Emily Dickinson once described how she recognized poetry.

Here is the first of three artists who sometimes lifts my scalp and tickles my brain.

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Tina Oloyede

Of the many artists who initially coalesced around the (primarily) Ultra Fractal-using contests and eventually settled into a circle spear-headed by Damien Jones and his Fractalus site, I always thought the most promising, if not most gifted were Alice Kelley and Tina Oloyede. Although much of Oloyede’s work stays true to a decorative style pioneered by Linda Allison, Oloyede sometimes wanders afield with spectacular results.

Fly Me to the Moon, above, is a good example of Oloyede in a more experimental mode. The piece is actually three works melded together to form a triptych. The title, a song most famously sung by Frank Sinatra, and a metaphor for being carried away with love’s rapturous abandon where one can "swing among the stars," here offers a more stable romance with the promise of multiple bliss trips. I find it comforting that ecstasy transportation comes thrice.

The lush, deep tones and modernist composition suit Oloyede’s work well. The cut-up technique becomes near-cubist in nature, as the recursive moon forms fall in and out of shadow or undergo various phases and eclipses. The textural patterns embedded on many forms often suggest the pockmarked lunar surface ravaged by meteor scarring — or, in the lower section of the middle image, geological surface features of the earth being orbited by its lone circular planetary satellite.

And I love how Oloyede uses space (no pun) in this piece. The forms seem to pulsate with motion and whiz in and out of the frame of our telescopic view. Plus, the white spaces formed by the triptych function like the gutters in sequential art and capture the sensation of watching time-lapse photography as the viewer scans the entire composition from left to right.

Although we are unable to hear the music of the spheres, it seems Oloyde has provided us a glimpse of a live performance.

Pond Life by Tina Oloyede

Fractal forms made with software often mirror their natural counterparts — like ferns and trees and flowers. But it takes both craft and talent to skillfully fuse the natural world with a digital composition, as Oloyede does with Pond Life. Absent narrative, the piece primarily relies on the aesthetic pleasures of a landscape or still life. The black background provides a sense of depth for the muted browns and yellows — which, in turn, call attention to the varied shades of green found in the living vegetation. The grey forms, however, suggest nature in decay, although the similarly colored lines running through the work could be interpreted as nourishing veins.

Upon closer inspection, considerable textural detail can be seen on individual leaves. Color variance provides contrast, too — even among forms of ostensibly the same color. The painted quality of Pond Life intentionally distorts the high-def clarity of nature, and, in a Brechtian sense, gently reminds us that the "snapshot" is constructed — is a made object. Finally, the entire work is filled with a feeling of distorted motion. Everything seems to be caught in the frozen moment of upward movement, thus adding even more depth as the forms appear to be extruding out from the darker background and seeming almost tactile enough to touch.

I’ve seen many natural forms make their way into fractal images, but very few are as aesthetically successful and creatively arranged as this piece.

Crackerjack 003 by Tina Oloyede

This is another non-narrative piece that relies on its design features for impact, although I enjoyed reading comments on Renderosity comparing the image to flags and hanging laundry. The interplay of shadows and light is certainly efficacious. The vertical and perpendicular forms establish a formal pattern which is then forcibly chopped by the cut up but near-self-similar arrangements seen on the top and bottom. The fracturing achieved by hacking formalist traits creates the sizeable tension this piece exudes.

Further adding to the sense of unsettling discombobulation are the seemingly random horizontal squiggly lines compartmentalizing the piano key-like rows and rendering them even tauter. The addition of scattered, faded forms, which function as shadows drained of their once potent energy, supply both perspective and depth and imply a level of intensity that risks blow out.

My one complaint with the piece is that I find the tacked-on frame to be unnecessary and distracting, although one might argue that its shadows add to the illusion of depth. To be fair, I admit to a general dislike of the use of digital frames. They nearly always seem contrived to me — and, if they cannot be cleanly removed, can ruin printmaking possibilities.

Crackerjack 003 lives up to its name. This piece pulses with an unnerving, abstract energy. I see this artwork was submitted to last year’s BMFAC — and did not make the cut. Considering some of over-embellished schlock that won — like this and this — all I can say is, well, Tina wuz robbed!

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Up next in the series: Art by Jennifer Stewart.