This is a question that pops up very often, as some of my artwork may seem to include fractals or fractal-like patterns.  There's a few reasons for this. Fractals are naturally-occurring at both macro-cosmic and micro-cosmic levels; they can be found everywhere in nature. They are particularly noticeable in snowflakes, the growth of vegetation, the swirls that come up when mixing milk and coffee, and in the way crystals, clouds, mountains, and galaxies grow and develop, among others. There are extensive links between fractal geometry and sacred geometry – and this may be more obvious, for example, when observing recursive iterations in sacred geometrical spirals.



Nonetheless, most fractal art available today is achieved with the aide of computer programs. I have not yet experimented with fractal-generating programs, though I may, some day. Most of my mandalas start out with a photograph of nature - which means that naturally-occurring fractals (or fractal-like patterns) may be present in the photograph. I intuitively manipulate these photographs and play with layered symmetries, filters, and reflections, to portray what the inner eye may see through the particular shape expressed in the photograph. I then “bring out” or “ground” the main underlying sacred geometrical blueprint for what could be considered a “mandala”, which is in part the focal point of the portal into other dimensions. This "bringing out" process can usually include the painting and superposition of sacred geometrical shapes.

Is this fractal art? A closer look...

Strictly speaking, none of the pieces I’ve made (up to now) could fully fit into all the criteria that accurately define fractals. According to Benoît Mandelbrot, who coined the term “fractal” as is being referred to here, a fractal is a geometric shape that can be split into parts, each of which is (at least approximately) a reduced-sized copy of the whole.  The set of images above comes from the Mandelbrot Set, by Wolfgang Beyer. Notice how the same shape can be found at different scales: the ones on the left are the bigger scales, and as we move towards the right the scale becomes smaller and smaller. Similarly, fractal art includes shapes that feeds into and/or build upon replications of themselves at varying scales. Furthermore, there is a set of mathematical and geometrical characteristics that fractals usually feature, for example:

  • having a fine structure at arbitrarily small scales;
  • being too irregular to be easily described in the language of traditional Euclidean geometry;
  • being self-similar;
  • having a simple and recursive definition;
  • and having a Hausdorff dimension which is greater than its topological dimension.

Some sections of some of my artwork and mandalas may loosely fulfill some of these criteria, most notably being peripheral or outsiders to Euclidean geometry, and having small-scale, detailed, fine structures. In some cases, I have also manually drawn fractal-like structures (for example, drawing pentacles within a pentacle, within a pentacle, within a pentacle, within a pentacle…).

Zooming in on my visionary artwork shows increasing levels of detail and complexity that do not necessarily involve fractals.