Paint by Fractals

30 July, 2013 by Tim

What shower of insults and rotten tomatoes are provoked up by such a play on the expression, “Paint by Numbers”? And yet, to those who know what galactic boundaries are quickly traversed by just a few (million) iterations of the simplest of fractal formulas, the phrase “Paint by Fractals” is nothing short of rocket-powered creativity. For those of you who aren’t sure of what I’m getting at just look at the pictures.

~Click on images to view full-size on original sites~

Double apparition of Louis XIV at the stairways of a Mini-minibulb in the Versailles of Mandelbulbs by Kraftwerk

How does this one make me think of “painting”? Although the elegant curves and ridges of the mandelbulb suggest a rich picture frame, what catches my eye and makes me say, “Son of da Vinci!” is the background imagery on the right-hand side, middle to top. It’s the sort of painterly touch that one often sees in renaissance portraits like the Mona Lisa; misty, hazy panoramic landscape.

Dodgeball with Flash Gordon by Sitting Duck

Maybe the “painterly” style is just the preference for subtle shading and the appearance of natural light. I have no idea who Sitting Duck is. I think he’s one of the many new names drawn into the Fractalforums.com orbit through their recent contest. If so, then the contest has been a success. This image reminds me of the many sci-fi fantasy paintings done by Frank Frazetta back when that sort of thing was popular, that is, before the advent of CGI when fantasy became reality. I like the overexposed areas of bright light and of course the multiple shades of rusty brown that would have caused even Da Vinci to start using a bigger palette –the old-fashioned, non-indexed type.

For which of his paintings would Frank Frazetta have ever have written a description like this:

Mandelbulb 3d DEcombinate of: Amazing+Surf Quaternion+CommQuat+IdesFormula | Bulbox+_AmazingBoxSSE2
Same as “Shiny bug transfixed by entomological pin” http://fav.me/d69ot6g but from another angle.

Truly, “Painting with Fractals” puts us in a completely different league. And language group, too.

Eat your Veggies! by indavisual

This one caught my eye for what is probably the most important aspect of the painterly style for fractal art: creativity. The painterly style challenges the opposing style of precise, slick rendering. The painterly style is a reminder that art is a matter of impression and not precise, diagrammatic or photographic depiction. We applaud the skill of painters when they paint something that evokes great thoughts and feelings, but when a talented painter paints a great photograph and imitates a camera, then who cares?

This one really shows how the distorting effects of whatever this guy did to this mandelbulb image can create something new and different where sticking to just the parameter settings of the program would yield something much more commonplace. The painterly style could be described as semi-destructive or even sloppy. The impressionist painters were described that way not because they actually were sloppy but because that’s how their work appeared when placed in the more established context of the (overly) realistic style of painting that came before them. Compared to a photograph, even the Mona Lisa would look “smudgy.” On it’s own, almost anyone can begin to see the artistry to such works as this one by indavisual (nice, multi-expressive screen name).

And that’s what fractal art as opposed to fractal science is all about: artistry. Of course it’s not too easy to define what is artistry and what is merely tech-nistry, but it’s worth loosening the bolts on one’s mind once in a while and seeing what comes from a more expanded visual range.

100511_by_pasternak

Rembrant-ish, but more than that. The radiating details that draw our eyes into the smudgy shadows are beyond the sort of hypnagogic visions that Rembrant’s own shadowlands ever depicted. Hypnagogic means just before you fall asleep. And Turner, too. This has all the subtle light shades and murky shallows of a Turner seascape with clouds, dying twilight and those things that only the eyes understand.

Calligraphy mountain by wackwang

From the fractalforums.com gallery page:

Description: http://www.flickr.com/photos/wackwang007/The calligraphy of Chinese characters as single elements, expressed the relationship between global and local, which is the calligraphy and fractal embodied.And I make it feel like Traditional Chinese painting as a form of expression.

This is not really a painterly example, strictly speaking, but the cellphone signature chop mark combined with the fractal cloud/mountain/trees structure does evoke a strong resemblance to Chinese art as the artist intended it to do tying it in closely to more traditional, non-digital imagery. I missed the 2d barcode (red mark) at first and only on closer examination realized it wasn’t a traditional Chinese signature stamp.

Hardwired Transcendence Engine by egress

Smooth rendering and, once again, the smudgy-ness are the beginnings of painterly style. Of course you still need an interesting image and composition and all those other serious art things. The swirly cables/wires and steel parts forms a nice composition as well as something with a little bit of a realistic touch that allows us to begin to think we know what we’re looking at when in fact we’ve been drawn into something strange and other-worldly. The cables in the bottom right are really fantastic. They look quite hand drawn although I’m sure it’s just the careful rendering selection that makes them look that way. This one looks like maybe it took some time to render. Does an airbrush count as a painterly tool?

Orbit Mandelbrot No. 2 by element90

The Buddhabrot is always quite a painterly looking construction so one has to really do something special to produce an exceptionally painterly looking one and element90 has done that here. It looks like parchment or skin or maybe thin aluminium. But the reddish/burgundy shade which takes over in the smaller parts starts to suggest leather. Or is it a recursive construction of old “pop-top” pop can tabs? One can never be sure what the audience sees when looking at fractal art. Just be glad someone is looking is all.

ATALANTA_FUGIENS_by_bo_dion

A detail from a painting by Escher? Once again, subtle shading from various degrees of combinations and permutations of light –isn’t that 90% of what oil painting is? — light? I like the combination of the sphere with the triangular shapes and squares. One would almost think it was a deliberate attempt by the artist to suggest a round square or something alchemical like that when in fact it’s a deliberate output from the formula. Of course the selection of this scene was the artist’s choice. Selection is a big part of fractal art.

Cliffs of Antartica by Kali

From the fractalforums.com gallery page:

Description: Experimental Kaliset heightfield render.
Based on Knighty’s Mandelbrot heightfield implementation included in the latest Fragmentarium version.

This is exquisitely painterly. Hard to believe it’s machine made, but then Kali has magical powers when it comes to working with machines like Fragmentarium. If this was a painting it would be acrylic: bright, modern and powerful. Colors da Vinci could only have dreamed of. Although, I think one would detect some mixed-media accents in the form of sketched-in outlines and structural markings. This could be pen and ink or pen and airbrush. See what I mean about Kali’s sophisticated rendering methods?

MengerKoch23hrddh_4 by ellenm1

Ellenm1 has a rather interesting collection of mandelbulb images on Flickr. This one I find to be the most painterly of the lot, however there’s a few other that remind me of Bosch and other famous painters not because of the lighting alone, but also because of the creative composition and un-precise, warped fractal imagery. To me, this is a face, the bottom being a monstrous mouth while the top morphs into a cut-away cranial dome. There are almost brushstrokes in some of the lip-things at the bottom. It’s refreshingly fluid and non-squarish. Perhaps that’s another painterly principle.

tumblr_mjsuarRvm71rswrhdo1_1280 by jakeronomicon

To see a world in a grain of sand… or in this case, a world on a shelf. If this was a drawer in a museum, it would be labelled “sunset”. This is the kind of image that gets written off as a preliminary render but is in fact quite an advancement over the more complex, precisely rendered kind of thing. Perhaps that’s because the artist, Jacob Bettany has only been working with fractals for less than a year and hasn’t picked up the bad habit of only making crisp scientific images with a fractal program. To render this more would be to render it less. To render this more carefully would be to render it more crudely. To render this richly would be to render it worthless.

94bf751edf4f11e2af4522000a1f8f13_7 by Jacob Bettany

This one’s off Jacob Bettany’s Instagram site, a service I’ve got very little experience with but looks very art-friendly in its format. Although clearly a mandelbulb derivative, this image does not seem to suggest zooming into it any more than one would step closer to a canvas hanging on a wall to take in the brushstrokes. I like the color and the flatness to this one. Flatness is something often neglected in 3d fractals. This would be a watercolor if it were a real painting.

Well, there’s plenty more I could show here but I think you get the idea of what the “painterly” style is all about and how it works. Hopefully more artists will take up the smudgy, over-exposed, flat and shadowy style a little more. Sometimes it takes real genius to see just how simple, and how simply made, good art can be. Especially in such a technology-laden, expert-heavy genre as fractal art where it’s much easier to make perfect photos than it is to make unique and stylish artwork.

More on Making Prints — and on Remixing

14 July, 2013 by cruelanimal

Two Prints: Geisha Remix (2012, Left) and Cleopatra Worries Remix (2012, Right).

I’ve written before about making prints. I don’t want to rehash what I said previously. However, my thinking has "evolved" a bit since I last opined on the subject in 2009.

The photo above shows two prints I recently made to be displayed in my office. Four years ago, I advocated producing paper prints over canvas prints — mostly, even after examining the advantages and disadvantages of each material, because museums seemed to prefer fine art paper Giclee prints over canvas ones. That bias suited me. As someone with a weakness for texture, I find that canvas preserves color better than paper but hammers down texture.

But time and age once again prove to be inevitable. As the computers I use to make art have become increasingly powerful, and as the original sizes I use to make art have become progressively larger, I now prefer making canvas prints for two reasons.

Size.

Weight.

The prints above were created on canvas, mounted to one-inch wooden stretcher bars, and then gallery wrapped (meaning, the edges of the prints were wrapped around the frames on all four sides). From a practical standpoint, if these images had been printed at the same size on paper, they would have been far too heavy to hang. You can get a sense of the scale of the prints by comparing their size to that of the light switches located below each print at the lower right.

Canvas prints are just more durable, too. Paper prints, by contrast, are staggeringly fragile and must be first encased under glass and then framed. True, one could always play the odds and pin a paper print to a wall. I admit that tack-up print will not be arduous to hang. But caveat emptor. Any trace of liquid is a paper print’s baneful enemy, and an inconvenient nearby sneeze immediately and permanently rearranges your print’s composition (and medium?) — and, by extension, its aesthetic and/or monetary value.

Now back to the problem of acute heaviness. Size matters says popular culture. Working bigger and bigger with better computers meant that I wanted to make larger and larger prints. Supermassive glassed and framed paper prints increasingly run the risk of pulling a wall down and throwing out my senior citizen back. Canvas prints, however, especially when unframed, are more often lighter than the smallest framed-under-glass paper print. Moreover, I like the added perceptual sense of the illusion of an endless horizon (both horizontally, as the term implies, but also vertically) brought forth by the technique of gallery wrapping.

I’d like to stress again, just as I did earlier on this blog, that I see prints as just one of several paths for displaying fractal/digital art — not necessarily a superior alternative to screen viewing. My dream, and one I will not likely live to see, would be to soak up digital art on Total Recall wall-sized scifi-ultimate high definition screens. Even now, I prefer looking at digital art galleries as well as OT and other art blogs on my Galaxy Note tablet. Digital art genuinely pops in high def, and a quick turn auto-adjusts vertically/horizontally allowing one to more distinctly study pieces whether rendered in portrait or landscape.

Still, living with an image is a far different experience than seeing one recreated in pixels on a screen or stamped using ink into a book. Prints occupy physical space and become integrated into the metaphysical fabric of our everyday lives. Hanging a print instantly changes a room — and changes the experience of everyone who wanders into that room.

Making prints of or drawn from fractal art still seems as close as I’ll ever get to practicing alchemy. Presto. Digital into physical.

~/~

You go to war with the army you have — not the army you might want or wish to have at a later time.
—Donald Rumsfeld

Cleopatra Worries (2002)

[Click image to view at full size].

Cleopatra Worries Remix (2012)

[Click image to view at half of full size.]

One beef I’ve always had with digital art is the fundamental lack of a one-of-a-kind physical object, as well as the difficulties inherent due to its subsequent near-perfect duplication. A digital master is easily twinned with no discernible loss of quality. The lack of a unique original is digital art’s biggest bummer. Shouldn’t there be some kind of trade-off? Isn’t there something digital art can do and be that is patently beyond the seemingly unparalleled capabilities of physical objects?

Digital musicians already heard this clarion call years ago. Digital objects can always be remixed.

Both prints above are from a remix series I undertook last summer. Both images (and numbering over 100 others in the remix project) were orginally created ten+ years ago on far more primitive tower computers. The master images usually measured only 800×600 pixels. Using Blow Up, a plugin from Alien Skin, I expanded the originals to ten times their original measurements before digitally post-processing some sweetenings to light/shadow, clarity, noise, and background detail. And all for one primary purpose: to display the works at a much larger scale.

And now originals that once would barely fill the space of a cell phone can now replete walls and occupy high-def flat screens.

This particular project was deliberately designed to essentially retain the compositional likenesses of the originals. But I haven’t always been so fastidious about preserving the constituent features of original digital works. I worked for several years on a series of 402 images called "Energy Vampires" that I described on my web site as

made by piling many layers over a "found" base image — like fractal art by other artists, advertising images found on the Web, and my own (mostly discarded) art. The result: these "energy vampires" came to exist by completely draining the source images of their original content.

and later elaborated on my blog that

I kept no record of whose images I bit in their beds — or which of my own were seduced and sucked to a husk. I deliberately did not want to remember. The process itself was all that mattered — just as the vampire is driven to feed off others with myopic need. The artist as leech. The artist as tapeworm.

The "Energy Vampire" series was admittedly closer to a dub remix than to an enhancement exercise. Each (r)evamped piece got seriously scrambled before being forcefully reconstituted. Still, the largest dimension any work in the series ever grew to was 1000×1000 pixels. So what would happen, I wondered, if I also blew up a few of those remixed vampires, too? Could they daywalk afresh — or would they combust in the new light of the sun?

Energy Vampire 383 Remix (2012)

[Click image to view at half of full size.]

Remixing the remixes. Digital art’s ace in the hole of cyberspace.

So you can take your physical object and stick it where the digital image don’t dub.

Orbit Trap

a blog about fractal art

Monthly Archives: July 2013

Paint by Fractals

More on Making Prints — and on Remixing