Party time

Something different from the splits-elliptic pairing, guaranteed to cause optical damage if contemplated too closely ;) A suitable closure for 2009, containing a wish for a beautiful 2010 for you all :D

Afternoon in the financial district

"As we stared up at the smoked glass and steel towers, these monuments to abstraction, these thrusting symbols of Man's folly and greed, the afternoon sun broke afresh upon the facade that reflected only other facades, and the spectrally shifted rays danced with the granular air to a tune unintended, washing human austerity with a temporary palette of natural grandeur."

Caustic resonance

Urban graffiti abstract style.

Highly strung

I sought something different and found it!

The mandala of unfolding

Basic splits-elliptic, but I felt the colours to be rather agreeable.

Thy eternal summer

Dreamy psychedelic abstract.

Winter seedlings

Next year's crop beneath an early sunset.

Urban dreams

As I assemble style galleries for the re-vamped website, I find myself obsessively revisiting each style and bringing to bear fresh know-how, like the antithesis of lovingly discarded pasts. A linked Sierpinski, rendered deliberately grainy in parts.

Dawn of the rising moonclouds

My submission for an Art Pack, based on this Blob Spirals Tutorial. This is considerably altered from the original method by blur reduction, variation substitution and transform linking. Still only 3 transforms and no final though.

The juice seller

I wrote a quick script to automatically implement the basic instructions for plastic pie. Later, whilst investigating julians, I thought to combine the two and got this, all seaside awnings and tangy orange :D

2010 calendars

A showcase of, and links to, my 2010 calendars at Lulu:

Abstracts



Gnarls



Fractal Foliage

Euclid's nightmare

An interesting challenge: to present a fresh twist on the rings2-julian style. The course of my explorations led to a clutch of diverting pieces, but this is the selected work, an attempt at representing a ferociously curved multi-dimensional space that would have the eponymous mathematician spinning around a single selected axis in his grave :D

The shadow of the tree

"Cursed be those upon whom the midnight-moon shadow of the tree shall fall."

Spookiness for WTC Halloween.

Arrested flow

Abstract.

Incubate

Something a little different: wispy, ethereal. Single Apophysis flame.

Twist sixteen

Running with what looks suspiciously like a 'twist' theme, a new twist on those elusive ngon-splits-rectangles flames :D

Spiral dreams

Abstract spiral design rendered deliberately with slight grain.

The Twisted Gallery

Just the place to display truly deviant art ;) Finally getting to grips with edisc-julians.

Stars behind stars behind stars

"Far away in that ocean of gold, stars were silently shooting and falling and finding their fates, among those billions and billions of merging golden lights. And curtain after curtain of gauze was quietly removed, and I saw stars behind stars behind stars, as in the magical Odeons of my youth. And I saw into the vast soft interior of the universe which was slowly and gently turning itself inside out. I went to sleep, and in my sleep I seemed to hear a sound of singing."

- from 'The Sea, The Sea' by iris Murdoch

One of my oft-quoted passages, I finally create an image of it! Rendered with flam3-2.8-beta3.

Sellafield sealife

The old glow-in-the-dark joke, but I couldn't resist the idea of psychedelic corals and teeming fish shoals just off the Cumbrian coast :D

Mekanik

Finally figured out this style!

The new stained glass

Oh, the things they can do with it now! Pre-linked splits-elliptic.

No smoke without fire

The gnarl form epitomises real-world behaviour of smoke.

Flight over Antarctica

The swirling snowdrifts and hidden mountains of that most mysterious of continents basking in the continuous twilight of its 'On' season.

Branes

Just very, very alien. The slight grain I left in deliberately.

They came before dawn

A mediaeval scene of a party of hooded figures arriving somewhere at Night's apogee, to who knows what frightful purpose.

September

Celebrating the early autumn light following a smattering of golden days.

Hot off the press

Extra, extra, read all about it! Celebrating the release of Apophysis 2.09 as thousands of addicts the world over get their fix of the purest iterations. The title comes from the likeness to rolled and stacked newsprint, but also contains an element of self-referentiality in both the first use of the program and my use here and shock revelation of a certain undocumented feature :whisper: ;)

Tip: linked transforms #2 - introducing pre-transforms

Oh joy! I recall my delight on discovering the power of linked transforms as introduced in the 2.08 release. This was a feature that wasn't trumpeted, just quietly slipped in. Well, those sneaky developers have done it again, given us a little Easter Egg quite undocumented in the spartan changelog. 2.09 has much going for it:

• much more responsive


• unused variations greyed out


• only used variables shown


• transform weight permanently visible in Editor


• transform opacity

The thumbnails are a nice addition, but an option to default to names would be better. And that Easter Egg? Right-clicking in the Xaos tab now gives 2 linked transform options: before and after. The old linked transform is now 'after', but the 'before' option, always available via a little work but again completely missed by yours truly, opens up yet another vast landscape of possibilities. In conformity with my previous notation, I'll refer to these as 'pre-transforms': all of this linked transform's output is fed to the selected transform, and it receives its input from all except itself.

All square

Just very, very square. Basic splits tiling.

Scream and scream again

A fractal rendition of Munch's 'The scream' for this 'I Want To Feel Contest'. The feeling is meant to be complex: "I sensed an infinite scream passing through nature" was Munch's own testimony. But I also fancy here a little of Sartre's "nausée", of MacNiece's "drunkenness of things being various", and more than a hint of Borges' "With relief, with humiliation, with terror, he understood that he too was a mere appearance."

A simple person, of basic unquestioning faith or Newtonian mechanistic worldview, is vouchsafed an unwonted, and unwanted, vision of the transdimensional source of all there is; or experiences how it feels to be a stretch-cover on a sofa; or, on sipping their morning tea, feels the full weight of the hardship, suffering and death that ensured that dried leaves, calves' sustenance, piped water and electricity came together to bring them their knee-jerk pick-me-up. How would you feel?

Viral

From cells empurpled with disease to those already gangrenous and necrotic, the transtellar xenovirus launches its network of fibres that turn host into toast :O

The experience of drowning

Flailing ceases. The light recedes as depth increases. A peace descends. Is death, then, peace?

Ribbons

Totally tangled.

The offering

Something to propitiate those capricious deities.

Composure

Abstract.

Mistrust

It may not be very fractal, but it's 100% Apophysis, barring frame and signature, courtesy of the CircleRand plugin.

Seeing twice

Two views competing for attention.

Pendulum

Marking time, showing duration: a calibrated measuring stick of one-way passage through a particular dimension.

Gnebula

Gnarls go all astronomical with some serious stellar birth pangs!

Shardonnay

A shattered glass of the famous white, with its lambent green-gold hues…

The glossolalia of fractal waters

Endless flubbling and teasing scintillations in as-yet unexpressed pools of potentiality.

Fiery gnarl

Gnarls are the new black in my fractal wardrobe. I'll begin with a hot little number...

Wrestling the psychedelic octopus

Happily, I lost the fight :D

Lavl

From the heaving hellfires of Earth's deep bowel comes the information, in tentacles and glyphs of flowing glowing rock, that all is not well :O

You are urged to follow the link and take full view for the details.

Ibex

This took many renders to get a satisfactory balance between the opposing elements of sharp/smooth, light/shade and fill/noise, but I'm happy enough with the result.

Night terrors: the old hayloft

While attempting to quiet my skittering breath, my attention was gently but forcibly held by the view along the old hayloft: the vista of the ancient wooden framework and farm implements and divers other arcane miscellania was as remembered, and yet curiously twisted into some kind of spiral tunnel, and somehow multiplied, going on and on into an undefined distance apparently illuminated somewhere near the infinity-point. The universe stopped spinning when the outer door was hurled open and a heavy uneven tread accompanied by ragged breathing took command of the space below. It began again with the first lumbering footfall on the ladder, and my own frantic crawl down that surreal passage.

Film noir

Moody shadow-filled B&W abstract, created entirely with Apophysis.

The clamouring hoardes

Abstract crowd flow.