Artist Statement

Painting with Numbers, A showing of Fractal Images by David W Riccio, June 2013

When I was a boy I was very interested in the sciences and mathematics, and not very interested in the Arts. I did however like to draw and make things with my hands. This pushed me into a college career in Chemistry and Engineering. In my Junior year of college I took my first class in computer programming (FORTRAN). It was love at first sight. I spent the next 4 years obsessed and immersed in the world of all things computers and computer programming. I wrote code in machine language, assembler language, FORTRAN, COBOL, BASIC, and bunches more obscure and now obsolete computer languages. I came to see the world as code and data and discovered the world would pay me to indulge my addiction. I have since programmed on dozens of different computers in dozens of computer languages. With a love of numbers, programming and later in life graphics it was, I think, only a matter of time before I discovered the world of computer graphics and then emerging world of Fractals. I have been playing with Fractal images and programs since the mid 70s. Over that time period the computer hardware has caught up with the demands of generating bigger, more detailed, and colorful Fractal Images. The Images in this show are the results of computer software that runs on a high end home computer. Ten years ago they would have taken days of computer processing on a mini-computer or mainframe computer to generate. I am now generating and editing them on a home computer. The program I have been using is an Open Source program (freely shared to the world) running on a Open Source version of Linux (Fedora 16 64bit) on a recycled dual core Intel based 64bit computer. (About $100 of out of pocket cash) The software I used can generate Fractals with four dimensions (4D) but displays a two dimensional projected view of the equation.

The Equations that generated the images in this show are some of the standard Fractal equations that have been studied for the last 30 to 40 years or are equations that I have created over the last 20 years. The selections of where in the Fractal Sets that were rendered is a choice I made while exploring the equations, the color selections are my own and some of the images have been further altered in Photoshop. A number of the images are composites of Fractals and Images from the Hubble Telescope. The colors have been adjusted to my artistic tastes and some editing of the resulting image structure has occurred. I love the shapes and color of these images. I love how some of the shapes are so organic and reminded me of living things. And how some of them are so reflective of shapes found in Nature, like landforms, star fields, and rock structures. I have wanted to do a show about Fractals to honor Benoit Bandelbrot's passing (11/20/1924 to 10/14/2010) and to show off some of the new features now available in the Software that generates these Equations as images.

I have been fascinated with Fractals for a long time and really enjoy how they exist both as a mathematical entity and as an artistic one. I hope you enjoy this showing.