Ian Duncan Anderson

A self-taught fractal artist specialising in high-quality large-scale renders that exploit the wealth of detail inherent in much of fractal art. Never one to get stuck in a rut, I have explored a broad stylistic range from minimal mono to richly detailed and colourful recursions; abstracts resembling traditional art to visions of future micro-technologies that could only be the product of digital daydreaming.

Fractal art is rooted in mathematics and requires much computational power to render to a standard suitable for printing. Having a fascination with the abstractions of mathematics without being a natural mathematician, an affinity with computers without being a programmer and a strong aesthetic sense, fractal art was perhaps bound to appeal. And yet that misses completely the sense of connection experienced on first coming upon images of zooms into the Mandelbrot set: I was hooked, captivated. This was the mid-'90s: it wasn't until 2001 that I obtained my first PC and discovered some basic fractal generating software. A computer crash forced me to search for the software again, and I 'stumbled upon' the world of fractal art. Unlike many other genres, it is still in infancy, and rapidly evolving as the community members contribute new formulae and techniques, and the program developers add new features and refine existing ones.

With their cross-scale self-similarity, fractals embody the 'as above, so below' of spiritual tradition. This is certainly a theme I like to explore, in addition to abstract, representational and the downright alien and transdimensional worlds that sometimes appear in dreams and other altered states.

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