Saturday, January 16, 2010

More Beginnings - Fractal Geometry

Every January, I think about where my art will go this year and what I've done so far. Every so often, I think to myself, "How did I get here?" My art story is a long and winding road with many, many stops along the way. My creative tendencies started before I was in kindergarten, but more on that later....

I started college with every intention of going to medical school. After all, as anyone who knows me will tell you, I was really good at removing the white part of bacon or any fat on my plate before it would ever pass my lips; almost surgeon-like. With this quality of separating the edible from the fat, along with a steady hand, I naively felt confident in that I already had one advantage over the rest of my classmates.


As a break from all of the hardcore science classes, I broke up my schedule with some kind of an art class every semester. This class always felt like a huge relief, and as if I were going back to my roots. Painting class always felt so easy by comparison. At some point, we had to create a series of pieces with a theme, and my dad informed me about this relatively new discovery (1975) in the world of mathematics- fractals. As timing would have it, there happened to be a very big article about fractals in his new National Geographic. As I looked at the article, I saw a distinct relationship to nature, and found the vivid colors endlessly fascinating. I created a series of works based on the various fractal types, and also worked with a mathematics professor to understand how certain math functions created the archetypal shapes. Here are a few of my early paintings from those days in 1993.

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