Why does it still live? What makes fractal art so exciting it doesn’t need anything except itself to keep it going? I guess then, the question is: what is exciting about fractal art?

I haven’t posted anything for 7 years.  Maybe 8 years.  I’m not sure.

So I’ve sort of been rebooted, blogoristically.  A rest is good sometimes.  It clears the RAM and with a Rip van Winkle category of rest it even reformats the harddrive deleting all those things that were important but you can’t remember what they were.

I’ve always thought fractals had something profoundly artistic to them as well as merely creative but I was never quite able to put my finger on that thing.

Fractals are the idiot savants of the art world.  They draw some incredible things and we pick them up off the floor from under their feet and frame them.

That’s what’s exciting about fractal art: the hunting and gathering.  Fractal artists come and go but the junk just keeps piling up!  No, no, I don’t mean that.

I like fractal art.  It has an alien mind behind it.

Here’s 3½ images that made me excited about fractal art all over again.

-click on images to view fullsize on their original site-

It is so simple and even a bit retro and yet so exciting. It’s made with Mandelbulb3D which gives it the 3D appearance, but it is essentially just a plain mandelbrot. So a sort of 3D variation of a 2D theme (2½D?) It’s hard to figure out what gives this image it’s visual energy but I think for me it’s the 3D characteristics. It’s looks like something we have just walked up to while strolling in a fractal shopping mall. A display for a bed and furniture sale.  The surface almost has a soft, puffy leather upholstery appearance. It’s from 2020. The mandelbrot formula will never get old or boring. It’s iconic and pneumatic.

If that first one didn’t spark you then this one should. Although, I should add that visual excitement is something you percieve. And if art is all about nuance, as I posted (years ago) then the spark that unleashes the Visual Energy in our minds can be quite eccentric and individual. We don’t all get zapped by the same thing.

What I like here in the MandelBox Golden Hall by “philb” is how easily 3d fractals create real spaces. Fractals, even 2d ones, “take us places” although the effect in the 2d realm is not as strong as in the 3d realm where it’s more natural, more vivid. Such a great feeling of spaciousness and rich luxurious, palatial spaciousness in this one. Images like this abound on sites like Fractalforums and Deviant Art but this one has that something extra, the Energy, the excitement. Why try to explain fractal art or art of any kind? Visual Energy describes it best. Excitement. We stand in one place and yet see a thousand things. Worlds and windows to worlds. A little bit of light goes a long way in a palace of glass.

Even a dog can learn what electricity is by touching an electric fence. We ought to be able to understand art just as well: that sudden energetic sensation and it’s unconscious reaction.

It’s the light. To me this one by HalTenny is like one of those great paintings that on the surface is just a common everyday scene and yet provokes some strong, great emotion in you and you don’t care what anyone else thinks about it or even any art critic. This one is a good example of what makes fractal art tick –why we spend so much time looking at it and making it and just exploring it. Sometimes we stumble on something great and remember how good life can be.

The light is from a setting summer sun. But not the last rays, there’s still some time before it gets dark. All day this mechanical thing was there but in these last moments of the day and approaching twilight, the machine slowly unites with the natural world around it as the sun drifts into that literally twilight zone of the evening. Too fragile and subtle is the lighting for capturing with a camera, only a painter could preserve what we’re seeing. If only one could remember such a thing.

The lighting reminds me of a famous painting by John Singer Sargent. “Sargent wanted to capture the exact level of light at dusk so he painted the picture en plein air – outdoors and in the Impressionist manner. Every day from September to November 1885, he painted in the few minutes when the light was perfect, giving the picture an overall purple tint of evening.”  Quoted from the Wikipedia: Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose.

It’s been said that art imitates life and I would add to that that art simply is life. What are the things we do for no other reason than we are alive?  That’s what it means to live. Art is what makes life lively.  And no wonder we often have such wide ranging reactions to art: we don’t all get excited by the same things in art or in life. Normal people have no interest in fractal art.

I said 3½ images and here’s the half. It came up on the “fractal” tag listings. (A lot of stuff comes up marked “fractal” on Deviant Art these days.) Naturally this is an AI image. Despite that, it does have a fractal-ish look to it. I’ve seen plenty of rich, elegantly flowing tendrils made in Ultra Fractal like this but in this case, like with all 3d graphics, this actually looks like you could step into the image and walk to the far side of this seascape image.

AI has something in common with fractals. It’s the Visual Energy. Like a lot of AI graphics, this one ought to be just some glitzy, slick scene from an amusement park. Again, the lighting? Maybe light is just another word for mood or excitement.

Here’s a randomly generated quaternion from Terry Gintz’s Fractal Zplot.  I call it Leonardo’s Saucer because it reminds me of the rough but stylish pencil sketches by Leonardo da Vinci.  And it looks like a flying saucer. Old school. Renaissance flying saucer.

Yeah? Well, I like it.

Terry Gintz’s random rendering programs from way back before this century have a graphical AI feel to them which works perfectly with fractal image parameters. It’s something else that I’ve enjoyed rediscovering: raw random image generation. Fractal art has a lot of life still left in it.