The (Artistic) Middle Ground

"The middle ground can be pretty far away sometimes."
—our very own Chris



I confess: This article is somewhat of a cop-out. When confronted with the prospect of introducing my own art, I could only come up with two broad statements about my fractal corpus: First, I like texture. Second, my fractals tend to be multicolored—I rarely work in monochrome, or even in duochrome, or even on one side of the color wheel.

Now, those two things hardly constitute a distinct artistic vision. So naturally, I picked the brains of my fellow bloggers in an effort to approach my art with fresh eyes.


At the time of writing, this is my most recent fractal. (Varied palette? Check. Texture? Check.) It is called "Draftsmanship" but any number of alternate names would suit it: Via Appia, Cobblestones, Primes, Crayola Architecture, Sketched, Fibonacci.

I also think that it may end up being a bit of a turning point for me, but it's difficult to explain how and why while the breakthrough is still going on.


This one, I chose because it has many of my "hallmarks" rolled into one image. Again you see the prevalent texture and multicolors—but none are particularly saturated or vibrant. It has some obviously fractal forms, but they are combined with things like ruler-straight stripes and (at the opposite end of the spectrum) distorted, structureless swirls.

That said, this is not entirely representative of my gallery. It's far more technical than average, far less naturalistic and blended, for instance, but I still thought it was an interesting amalgam of some of my artistic tendencies.


And, I occasionally do something that is just wacky. I'm not under the delusion that this is one of my best fractals—I didn't choose these three to be impressive; I meant them to be a representative slice of my explorations, and I'd be lying if I said that I didn't have a significant number of "experiments" like this lying around. Rest assured that the results of the experimentation tend to get incorporated into my more polished work, even if only I am really aware of it.

So, how did Chris, Esin, and Travis characterize my style? The general consensus seemed to be that my fractals look earthy and not-very-computerized. Leafing through my gallery and portfolio, I think that's accurate. I'm no good at artistic self-assessment (luckily for you I'll mostly be assessing other people in this blog) but even I can spot my own predilection for creating a fractal that gives away the human aspects of its creation more than the digital ones.

The quote at the top is yours to puzzle out on your own, though.