close
Early 2001 was when I picked up UF, and while I had been doing
fractals for a long time (the first half of the eighties if I may be
so bold as to include the crude, pixelated stuff done on my old
Sinclair Spectrum) I was immediately in love with the sheer wide range
of possibilities this fractal engine offered. UF is really a compiler
for a language that was specifically designed to do fractal artwork -
pure genius. It took a lot of the experimentation and guesswork out of
the sheer creation of a shape and allowed the user to focus on
artistic issues instead.
The products of that year are dominated by things I am not necessarily
proud of: experimentation with shape ("Silently", "Sheets"), color
("Deceptively Simple", "Tartan"), light ("Lighting", "Coral") and a
little texture here or there ("Circulation", "Sufficiently advanced
Technology"). I didn't really compose things well yet and spent most
of my time mastering the technology of the fractal engine - which left
me little room for true artistic expression. I consider only a small
minority of these pictures to be "ready for publication".
Notable items generated in this phase include the two "Dragon" images
- I played with this same shape some more in the following year and
the whole series can be found
right
here. "Fire and Water" was my first attempt to create something
that alludes directly to reality, and I think I didn't do too
shabbily. "lighting" was the first image where I tried to combine
shape, color and light and create a "complete composition" including a
background.
Each of these images has some kind of story attached to it - how and
when and why it was created and what was on my mind at the time and
what I wanted to do and what I ended up actually doing. But the most
blatantly obvious of these is "Blastula", created early october 2001
about seven or eight weeks before the birth of
my son
Asa. It suddenly occured to me that I had not done anything that
referenced my wife's pregnancy, even though that was certainly the
condition that dominated
our lives
in that year. Well, and what you see here is what I came up with -
and I think it ain't too shabby for just some math and bits.
"Up and Down" is actually a rework - the original wasn't
quite
as pretty as this one, but in the middle of 2002 I lost many of my
parameter files in a HD crash and in 2005 someone asked me if I could
make a higher-resolution render of it and so I re-created it then.
