I look forward to the coming of spring like everyone else who does not enjoy the cold of winter ... but for me and millions of others, we gotta get ready, because otherwise, spring allergies will pack a knockout punch, and nowadays, coughing and sniffling gets a different reaction in public than it did before Covid-19 ... the world has changed!
The above is my "Floral Boxer," a pure fractal flame designed in Apophysis 2.09, mirrored and overlaid upon itself to show the fractal's affinity for symmetry, and put on white so the pastels of the colors can be seen ... golden-greens and mostly wisteria and lilac-type colors, which are among my favorite neighborhood flowers!
Many items in the natural world have the math of fractal geometry, which allows them to be "self-similar" to each other ... and mirror imagery is one way that becomes obvious. If you think of it, every flower is kind of a "mirror image" of the next, and so working in fractal art points up the math that makes many familiar things in our world. Since fractal geometry is so obviously dominant in many plants and especially in flowers, and also in how every human body is similar to another in its symmetry, sometimes the two sets of math will overlay, and this is a spring foliage-colored case. Apophysis allows for 700 palettes and a ton of variation within each one, and there are several of the ready-made palettes that remind me of spring flowers.
Some examples of me first recognizing the ways the maths combined exist from earlier on PeakD -- say hello to my "Heliotrope Knight," a case in which a pure fractal came out looking like a humanoid figure made out of another of my favorite flowers without me having to do any mirroring:
... as compared with the color and visual texture of heliotropes in the wild...
Image by Alina Kuptsova from Pixabay
... and in that case I reversed the game on those spring allergies, because heliotropes have the most lovely fragrance ... a whole story in Alien Art Hive community resulted from that fractal ...
He went upwind of the building, and faced the sun … he was a big crystalline heliotrope, basically, of course, and that's what heliotropes do … but all at once he started dissolving into a thick smoke, and the blue smoke flew on the breeze toward the house and went into every opening. Ten minutes later, we heard people start singing in the building, songs of spring and joy and happiness, and at last they came out dancing with one another … all the hostages came out, looking and feeling footloose and fancy free, followed by the hostage takers...
@deeanndmathews/the-heliotrope-knight
But in the case of "Floral Boxer," that is sort of a manifestation of my reality as spring approaches and the early blooms of plum trees, magnolia trees, and local flowers are announcing themselves to the delight of my eyes ...
Photo by the author, Deeann D. Mathews, February 15, 2025
... but the beginning of mourning to my nose and throat!
But, instead of being upset about it, I have chosen to make art so that I -- also you -- can expand the delight of the eye in the beauty of the coming spring!