Not Fractal Art #1

The piece above is part of a small series called Not Fractal Art. Check out subsequent blogs for more.

I have felt like some of my artwork is unintentionally moving toward a look that one would expect to have been generated via fractal technology, but I am arriving at the look organically instead. For example, I love to draw spirals, and spirals upon the spirals, and leaves based in spirals upon spirals; and the more I do it, the more some of the leaves look like they are fractal art. It feels like a weird—but also wonderfully wyrd and based in my faerie sight—process to come at this independent of the technology. But I am just seeing nature’s patterns and painting what I see, and was thoroughly surprised one day when I saw some fractal art and realized how much its appearance has in common with what I create. But I paint what life looks like for me. It is a very happy way to see life. Science and magic really are not at odds.

And arriving at this place through meditation on Gaia has been done before. Just look at Celtic knotwork or Tibetan mandalas. This is such an interesting experience to be having.

This series represents a deeper portrayal of my meditative visions of nature, when they resemble vector art, while also consciously working with the concept of arriving someplace that looks somewhat like vector art but is instead reached organically.

I want to be clear that, though I say I am doing this independent of vector technology, it’s surely subconsciously influencing me. After all, I do not live in a void. But it is not either/or; I also want it clear that I am mostly coming from a place of personal internal vision, not external influences. So, though Celtic knotwork, Tibetan mandalas, and other influences are definitely there, they do not dominate the experience I am having in meditation and therefore do not dominate the paintings either. This might seem impossible and, thus, my saying all this might make me appear so oblivious of my internal process that I do not see its influences.

Quite the opposite is true, I have enormous self-awareness, which is allowing amazing visions, visions of such primary aspects of nature that they are affirmed by other mystical art traditions. My visions are a culmination of decades of my shamanic practices, and I feel so blessed to be having these experiences and to see them affirmed.