Passion or Balance?

So-called insanity occasionally takes over my life, and I’m quite proud of that fact. One of the latest creative bursts I had involved Python swallowing me whole for a couple of weekends, capturing me with its intricacy until the break of dawn. While I don’t know exactly what will come out of my newfound ability to write hacky code, fractals have already been thrown into the mix - as a prime ingredient no less.

The point this ultimately brings me to is one of passion: Truly great things never happen without it. They don’t happen when there’s a clearly defined plan, when everything is laid out. They don’t happen at a relaxed pace, or even a 9-5 hectic one. No, what we need is something entirely different. Something which can’t be forced.

Letting my mind wander for no apparent purpose, having the opportunity to explore things I’m curious about (just because), gives me the chance to refill my creative well and let it spill out over all areas of my life. Even if its practical applications were not clear from the beginning, finally being able to program a bit is actually a childhood dream come true. Isn’t that what we life for, after all? And it might just be the secret to make things happen.

Self Censorship

Learning how and when to censor yourself is very important when developing any artistic skill. The way you go at this process can have a huge impact in your skill. I try to keep my learning curve steady and steep, in a way that actually makes it enjoyable and worthwhile. In that sense, it’s important to allow myself to go in different directions, and knowing when an experiment is proving worthwhile.

I see a lot of people telling themselves that their work is not good enough. Most of the time, that’s just not true. There is always something worthwile to be found, even if it’s hard to spot at first. True skill lies in laying that something bare, stripping it of all fat and needless filler, and be confident enough to put it out into the world. That skill is what makes true artists.

Don’t let “it” stop you

“It” can be anything. It can be your own fear, your perception that what you’re doing is not right, that you somehow don’t hold up to the imaginary standard you set for yourself. Your energy is constantly expanding, but when you put the various “it”s of your life in the way, you will only block yourself.

There are several things I’ve had to clear out of the way lately: The idea that any and all of my images must be accompanied by “thoughtful and deep” words, thinking it’s ok for a completed image to remain unpublished just because I don’t feel like writing today, believing I don’t need to share what I do with the world, that I only do it for myself.

All these things have proven to be so wrong on so many levels. I can’t keep hiding behind this kind of “it”. I owe that much to my creative spirit. Just like most paradoxes in life, as soon as you face it head-on it has a tendency to resolve itself, to vanish into air. I don’t have to write content to pad this wonderful image I present to you, but curiously, I can’t help it from pouring out of me.

99% inspiration indeed.

The Meaning of Symbols

I had a discussion recently over at Koldo Barroso’s site, regarding one of his pieces which had a very strong symbolic meaning for me, which was apparently never intended by the author.

In response to my comment, he mentioned:

I usually get an image in my head and later I add a text or a story to it, ’cause I’m more of a painter rather than a writer. So, the image comes to my head, I don’t think of the image in terms of symbols, but later it can be interpreted.

This answer illustrates a rather curious fact. Why is it that we are always looking for meaning and symbolism in everything we see? Is it not right for a work of art to exist just for it’s own sake, without necessarily transmitting a message?

I’ve curiously fallen into this habit too. The fractal images I create based on chaotic principles always start out as a blank slate, dots littering the screen, just being dots. However, as soon as I start arranging them in a specific order, a meaning emerges. The chaos becomes something more; all of a sudden it stands for a concept, a state of mind, or even a mythical creature.

I guess all of this just proves that we are fundamentally creative beings, that we choose our own meaning for things whenever we can’t find any. But is the meaning of anything even there, before we take our very first look at it?

Ultimately, it’s just the other half of our joint creative act taking place, don’t you think?

Building a Solid Foundation

There’s something that can be said about the depth of shadows and style that come out in an image when you remove the clutter of too much bright coloration. Doing a black & white fractal like this once in a while really brings me back to the core of art.

I love complex, elaborate works (be they books, movies, games, images) but if the central expressive force can’t stand on its own, the rest is just wasted effort. I’ve been adjusting my own direction lately, and while my external projects might not seem to be moving along very fast, my internal structures are changing at an alarming rate, placing the foundation for great things to come.

This principle applies to everybody, all the time. You may think you have nothing going on right now, but there will always be a project of utmost importance on your plate: the unfolding of your own life, the creative expression of your soul. Don’t let it crumble under its own weight.

So how does your foundation look? Right now it may not make a difference, but a few years down the road it will be crystal clear what kind of heart your project had. Don’t confuse embelishment with good craft, don’t let your “creativity”, “vision” or “plans” get in the way of building solidly, from the ground up.

Always in progress

You’ll find plenty of colorful images on this site. However, only the fewest (perhaps this one or that other one) could actually be called “complete”, and only in the sense that I’m not likely to be tinkering with them for the time being. The rest of them are merely studies, scribbles, sketches, experiments, representations. A tiny sliver of who I was at that moment, frozen in time through little pieces of data, nothing more.

I don’t keep a gallery. This site is closer in nature to an atelier, a studio. I invite you to come in here and look at my work while it’s wet, fresh and authentic. I love blogs because they’re the perfect medium for this vision: Always in progress, always changing, always evolving. It’s the only constant in art, and in life.

The Second Half of Art

I have always said that creating art is only the first half of the work, half its significance. The other part, the one that completes the piece, makes it come full circle and gives it meaning, is the act of observation.

This was made very clear to me recently, when Deb left a comment in one of my latest posts to tell me how I had moved her to open up and start listening to her artistic inspiration. Barely knowing me, she told me of a vision that struck her, an interpretation I had never intended but which was nevertheless very powerful - in a way relevant to her and her unique viewpoint.

A particular image, just like the fractal it’s composed of, can replicate infinitely to present a unique and personalized version of itself to each of its viewers, sometimes meaningless, sometimes deeply transforming. My own perspective is only one among many, and with that realization, all I can do is take a step back and let my art speak for itself, allowing it to unfold and reach its fullest potential - without being hampered by the constraints of my particular interpretation.

In that spirit, today’s piece doesn’t come with an introduction. Instead, I’ll let you decide what to make of it, how to complete the puzzle that brings something deeper to this mere collection of colored dots. I must say that I am deeply grateful to you, for you have given my art a breath of life, and by doing that, turned into an artist yourself. I’d love to hear about your interpretation in the comments, if you feel like sharing it.

Phoenix

Don’t think that fractal art has anything to do with sitting down and creating a piece all by myself. My workflow is better described by the process of finding a combination of pseudo-random parameters that speak to my imagination and tweaking them into a presentable expression.

However, in spite of this seeming randomness, I’m never surprised to see the same themes emerge time and time again. The essence of a concept often seems to find its way into my image by its own will, instead of being depicted deliberately.

An old mythological friend of mine is visiting more frecuently these days, even though I wasn’t particularly looking for him. Of course he’s “just” a symbol, representing something that supposedly doesn’t exist in the physical sense, but let me point out that magic only appears in your life once you start believing in it.

Imagination to image to reality. Might that be the lesson he carries?

Peace

Slade has done it again. He took a simple concept and put it into words in a way that has deep implications. His latest post, Spinning your Story, talks about how we can transform the stories of our own life simply through a new perspective. The Stories that No Longer Serve You, the original piece that inspired his follow-up, is also purely magical. These two posts were the firestarters of what I’m writing about here, the changes I’ve been going through recently.

Our continual experience of this life is nothing more but a single moment traveling along the axis of time, changing at every interval. That is our prime human quality, our ability to evolve, to move away from the things we no longer wish for, to align our lives with our self declared purpose. In short, spinning our stories.

I used to be - still am, to some extent - a violent person. My emotions have carried me away more times than I can count, bringing me right to the edge, thankfully allowing me to stop right before irreversibly crossing the line. But after much searching within me for the cause of this seemingly unwanted behaviour, I came to a baffling conclusion: the energy behind these impulses I have felt isn’t something bad; it’s actually the source of my passion, my inspiration. The violent states I have found my mind in are too often just a way for my spirit to express a primal, creative urge that I haven’t really given an opportunity to come forward through other means.

I realize that I am able to transform the violence I feel into something different. Chaos can be destruction, but also creation - ultimately, both of these opposites join in a single circle of endless transformation. Physical matter continually changes form; oceans to clouds to rain to rivers, and so on. The same also applies to the matter of the mind, the heart and the spirit.

Now I finally have an explanation for those spontaneous bursts of passion overcoming me from time to time, those rare but overwhelmingly strong urges to create art, causing actual, physical pain to me if I don’t drop everything to follow them to the artistic extremes they will inevitably lead me.

That is what happened to me that other day when I made a fractal that expressed pure violence, an energy that burst out of me right onto the digital canvas, interrupting the midst of a regular, dull day at my job. It urged me to say what I couldn’t find words for at the time, releasing a vital passion from deep within me, making me feel like my spiritual lifeblood was being splattered across the screen.

It’s hard to explain if you haven’t lived it. My spirit was screaming, forcing me sit up and take notice; Social inhibitions and self-imposed responsibilities faded away, leaving room only for pure creative instinct. A long confined energy was liberated in the midst of a whirlpool of conflicting feelings. It was simultaneously maddening and exhiliarating.

Since that day, I have been consciously spinning my story, transforming a life of frustration, stress and repressed creativity into that of an artist on the path to self-discovery. Choosing to gain my bread elsewhere allows me to fully delve into my work without tainting it by thoughts of profit and marketability. I am starting to develop a sense of compassion, total acceptance of all the elements present in my life. I finally feel that I am beginning to know what I stand for. I am decyphering the message, and if there was only one thing I could pass on to others in my lifetime, it would be this:

All human beings are capable of creative expression. Rather than having you admire my art, I’d rather inspire you to make your own, whatever form it takes. Not all works of art are free, but Art, the right to create it, to feel it, to express it, is. Art is larger than any category we could slap on it. It’s so much more than just painting, sculpting, writing or making movies. It is a way of life, a way to express our divine spark in every action we take.

This has always been the underlying current of my blog, but now I have finally found the clarity to put it into words. This is a rather long post by my standards, and to wrap it up, I’d like to share with you a new spin I’ve put on a fractal you’re already familiar with, mixing up the same ingredients into something totally different, yet strangely familiar. I am calling it peace.

Seven Random and Weird Things

I got tagged by Patricia with this meme quite a while ago. The rules are simple:

1. Link to the person’s blog who tagged you.
2. Post these rules on your blog.
3. List seven random and or weird facts about yourself.
4. Tag seven random people at the end of your post and include links to their blogs.
5. Let each person know that they have been tagged by posting a comment on their blog.

I will be skipping 4 and 5, considering that I’m quite late to join and there’s no one left I’d like to tag, thanks to Slade and his “7″ people

Anyway, here are my seven things, in no particular order:

1. I have a weakness for blogging, and I also happen to love cats. I can normally get away with it relatively undetected, being an eccentric artist and all, but I just couldn’t resist this meme, despite it being a little off-topic. Other responses I’ve seen so far have been great, and I’ll second the thought that infusing a blog with some actual humanity can only be a good thing. Someday, I’ll even blog about my actual cats (there are many of them, so be prepared!)

2. It’s currently over 30ºC outside, which is nothing surprising considering it’s summer down here in the southern hemisphere.

3. I have an exceptionally high IQ. My ego tells me this is really important, though I don’t really listen to him all that much. Anyway, from early childhood I was always fascinated by mundane objects that border on the metaphysical, and was driven to quiestion their very nature. Automatic doors, electrical circuits and mirrors, specially, always gave me the impression of revealing the deepest secrets of this world. More on this in a not so distant blog post.

4. When I was 18, a lot of people thought I was 22. Now that I actually am that age, people tend to guess around 27.

5. I speak 3 languages: native tongue (german), that of my country of residence (spanish) and english (of course). it’s curious that speaking multiple languages actually deepens one’s understanding of each of them. The superficial shapes one perceives normally start to give way, revealing the underlying structure of a given language from the perspective of another. Languages are truly marvelous human inventions.

6. Being creative in an artistic way runs in the family. In fact, my brother’s band recorded their first song just a while ago. I’ve said it elsewhere and will say it again and again: You’re an artist as soon as you start considering yourself one. So congrats to my brother, who has the guts to go out into the world and chase his dreams.

7. I don’t eat meat. Not because I have anything against it in principle, but because I just stopped liking it. I still eat plenty of fish. More on the philosophical debate behind this at some later time, go read this article by Kenton in the meantime.

There are a lot of random things I thought of, but since this post had to be capped at 7, I think I’ll be sneaking them into my future posts, one little piece of randomness at a time. Looking back over my archive, some my older entries feel a bit lifeless, missing a certain spark I have always professed to have. It’s all about that spark - true human interaction - not just people throwing words at one another. Anyway, if you are reading this and haven’t done the meme by any chance, please be my guest and let me know about it.