Painting Using the Fractal Gradient

Painting using oil is no easy task.
The time involved often spans over days, weeks, months, sometimes even years.
The mediums involved are often far and few between in the way of texture, consistency, and overall chemical makeup.

When I was still under the guidance of my mentor William Vanya, he always used to tell me; it all comes down to fractals, Chris.
Now that I've had the time to analyze his methods I think that I have come to a realization about what he was telling me in regards to this new painting style.

Imagine, if you will, that you and everything that you experience is contained within a shakra. Now, for us to experience our inward sense of space/time (especially the way it relates to hand-eye coordination) can be viewed as a consistent pattern. This pattern is something like a continuum, or an elongated fractal column, stretching out again and again in infinite different pathways. This would be much like a metal rod juiced up with 10000 volts of electrical charge, each time it strikes, it will strike a different vector in the shakra to which it is attracted, and each time in it's own unique trajectory.

While Will has a very specific way of using his paintbrush (always spinning the tip), I think that his methodology, while not common among most painters, was meant to be seen as sort of a catch-basin to the minds eye rather than any tangible procedure.

I've always wondered whether the old chinese caligraphers had any sort of heads up to modern painters.
What I think links the gap between painters and calligraphers is the shared vision of attaining ideal placement within the fractal gradient. Reaching overall harmony and placing every stroke in succession to the last, without any major divergence, would be the aim of understanding the fractal gradient.

The forms of which a caligrapher is attempting to achieve is the same form that painters use in which to execute their paintings. To reach the form takes practice, thought, and meditation.

If within our shakras, everything can be seen as reticulum (or a matrix) within the atmosphere, then the reticulum of a particular vector (or vectors) on a particular fractal trajectory can be scaled. Using a paintbrush, one can perform a formative elongation of oil onto canvas in a series of momentary ellipses in which all correspoding vectors are aligned and a streching of the fractal gradient can be achieved.

It takes time, coordination, and practice to get it right, but when the moment is primed and ready, a painter will use this gradient to capture a moment as long as one is able to stretch that fractal arrangement. A moment of fractal enlightenment can be achieved in a single brush stroke, a series of brush strokes, or even an entire painting. The way our experience relates to the physical application of paint to canvas also depends on a knowledge of the subject matter and how long it has been studied within that arrangement. The fractal gradient can only be honed through practice and experience. A painting that arrives fully orchestrated as one coherent structure is always a beautiful thing, and a result of thorough understanding and experience within the fractal arrangement.

To continue onto another analogy..

I believe that at it's very heart, painting, much like calligraphy, is a sort of ballet. The stage is set when the underpaintings have gone in, the audiences arrive as the motivation and inspiration, and the performers take on the guise of color, medium, texture, tone and contrast. In this ballet what people take away with them is not any of the performers, stagesets or audiences, but the overall flow of the performance and the form to which the performers adhere. To me, form can be found in perfect harmony on the fractal gradient, which manifests a complete performance when executed in tangent with all other forms being used.

Joan miro once stated: "The works must be conceived with fire in the soul but executed with clinical coolness." and I believe that he hit the nail right on the head.

© Chris Hawke 2013