Valley artist spotlight: Mike Buck - Phoenix Runway Fashion
Source: Michael Wells
According to Wikipedia, “fractal art is a form of algorithmic art created by calculating fractal objects and representing the calculation results as still images, animations, and media.” This might sound a little dry, but Valley artist Mike Buck is a master of blending the digital media with organic shapes and spectacular colors to produce breathtaking works that are both awe-inspiring and captivating.
The fractal art of Mike Buck
2015 TechnoVisions Abstract Arts (used with permission)
As an outstanding emerging local artist, Mike's work will be featured in this week's RAW: BOLD fashion and art show in Phoenix. I asked Mike a few questions about his art, his tools, his background and his inspiration. Here's what he had to say.
Briefly describe your childhood.
I grew up in the Sunnyslope area of north central Phoenix, the youngest of three children. I had the privilege of attending the same grade school for eight years then the same high School for four with the same group of neighborhood kids; we formed life-long friendships and still see each other to this day. We were part of the first TV generation and grew up watching the Wallace and Ladmo show, and quickly developed a keen sense of irreverence to society in general, thanks to them. Growing up in the age of the Beatles, Rolling Stones, Walter Cronkite and Vietnam on the 6 o’clock news, men on the moon, Watergate, disco and pre-AIDS free love formed the backdrop of a rather happily twisted life.
When did you first notice a love for art?
I can remember visiting the public library with my mother and being placed in front of the pre-reader picture books and being mesmerized by all the different styles of illustration and color. Soon afterwards I saw sunlight streaming through a stained glass window for the first time and that was it… I was hooked to the beauty that light, color and patterns can create for the rest of my life.
When did you realize that you needed art in your life as more than a hobby?
As I approached 30 I realized that I needed to settle down a bit, so I put myself back in school, and met a woman with two small children, thinking this was what a normal life should be. I found out quickly, though, that I had to have regular, deep periods of introspection in order to stay sane, and when I first discovered an early computer program that could generate fractals, I became obsessed. I had found the one outlet to release the yearning for the wanderlust I always felt, and would spend hours designing and perfecting the patterns that never started, never ended and never stayed the same, simply so I could lose myself in them to escape this reality. It was at that point that I realized art had become as necessary to my soul as water and food was to the body.
What does the term “fractal art” mean to you?
That’s kind of a loaded question. For most people who are aware of what fractals and fractal geometry is, it means a self-repeating pattern without beginning or end, constantly changing. To me, the term “fractal art” means the beauty I find around and within me, always changing, never the same twice, and it’s taught me to appreciate and savor every moment I’m aware, almost meditative like a Zen koan, hopefully leading me to a more enlightened place.
Either that or it’s a cheap, huckster way to make a quick buck by foisting pretty colors in front of the brain-dead masses and calling it High Art… it really depends on my mood. You better not use that last part, though. J
What software do you use? And are you a PC or Mac artist?
These days I find myself using Ultra Fractal 5 or Mandelbulb 3D fairly exclusively, but I still go back to some earlier programs, like Xaos, Tierazon or Sterling 2 for inspiration. I currently have around 50 different fractal related applications installed on my PC. I always felt MAC’s were too elitist and impractical for most people, and certainly for businesses, in spite of all their marketing efforts. MAC people always remind me of those images on TV of people drinking Jim Jones’ Kool-aid.
I have experience creating fractals with a program called Apophysis. Have you ever used it? What are your impressions?
I have used Apophysis, but I’m not very drawn to the whole flame fractal genre very much, in part, I think, because of the amount of time it takes to generate a decent image. Mostly I use Apophysis for its ability to create and export files (.upr’s) that I can then import into my other applications as color params. For that, it’s invaluable to me. If I’m going to mess around with flames, I like the J Wildfire collective better, and I think it’s a more complete package, with wire mesh built in.
What usually triggers your creativity? Do you do it to unwind, as a technical challenge, or maybe as an artistic escape?
I find I’ve had to discipline myself to sit down and work on either a new formula, image, or tweak an old set of parameters every day whether I feel like it or not, just so that when I do feel inspired, or my curiosity kicks in and I start refining an image or combination of formulas I can find the end product satisfying. Sometimes I do it just for a technical challenge, but mostly, it’s an escape and a way to see into my subconscious mind effectively. Mostly my most creative endeavors have happened late at night, dozing off in front if the monitor, where my subconscious guides my work with no awareness until I wake up and see what came out.
How would you rate the work of other fractal artists? Is your work more complex than most of what you’ve seen?
I’m an infant compared to most, I swear. Some of the works I have seen by the giants who’ve come before me leave me in awe. Paul Carlson, Janet Parks, these guys just floor me with the shapes and patterns they’ve come up with. I’m very lucky to have found a medium where everyone involved is so open and willing to share techniques and tips, and since the entire 3D realm of Fractal Arts is so new and recent (2007 was the first viable 3D rendering of the basic Mandelbrot set) I feel like I’m a pioneer on the frontier of a new and infinitely mind-bending art form. I’ve learned so much from people all over the world thanks to the internet forums dedicated to fractal arts, and consider myself lucky to be able to share my art and my ideas so freely with others. Fractal Arts have always been much bigger in Europe than they have here in America; so much of what I’ve learned has come from the artists in those countries.
Where do you get the inspiration for your color schemes? Are these taken from nature, industry, or do you just work with different shades until the piece feels right?
A lot of the color schemes come straight from practice, and the 1000’s of color parameter files I’ve collected over the years. For textures, I tend to find some public domain image and throw it into the mix until I get just the right textural shading the image is requiring. Depending on the subject matter, I’ve used grimy, soot laden inner city images as shading in nature studies, and pastoral flowery images in industrial workplaces to give the work a nice subliminal juxtaposition. The Hubble Telescope and the images released into the public domain have been a great gift to digital artists all over the world.
So much of my image relies on the feedback received from each part of the whole that it’s impossible at times to extract the individual components anymore because they’ve been altered in fundamentally basic ways.
Fractal art is, by nature, quite abstract. How receptive are viewers to this form of art?
I find that people either love it or hate it vehemently �C there is no middle ground when it comes to fractal art in general. Oddly enough, people in technology fields tend to discount and brush aside this type of art as somehow less than legitimate. A lot of people see the most common type of fractal art as a series of swirling horns and changing colors and think it’s nothing more than tie-dye hippie-shit done by burnt out acid cases from the sixties, but it’s so much more than that.
Fractals surround our daily lives, we live, eat, breathe them every day, from the smallest sac of flesh squeezing carbon dioxide out if our bloodstreams to the traffic jams we encounter on our way home from work. Most Fractal artists find beauty in the most mundane images and use those as launching pads to explore and explain the natural world around us. Each image can be fertile ground for inner exploration and discovery, as well as teach us to see and appreciate the patterns we find ourselves living through every day. Once a fractal artist can make that connection in a viewers’ mind, they’re forever hooked, and it’s those people who see these images as wondrous creations, mirroring the greater world around us.
What tips would you give artists who are interested in this media?
Give up sleep, seriously. Play around, have fun, break things, make ugly pictures, learn, study, ask and repeat over and over again. Asking “what if?” helps a whole lot too when you’re first starting out. For every semi-satisfactory rendering I made, there must have been hundreds of pixelated piles of crap on my monitor that I threw away and started over from.
Find a forum, a website, and a Facebook group to look through, see what others are doing and find someone whose work you admire, and then try to do what they’ve done to get there. It’s a whole lot of trial and error, and all it costs is time and sleep.
How do you feel art can change a person?
Art has the ability to transform our souls and open our eyes to the greater world around us. It can make you feel a part of something grand and exciting, or all alone is the vast sea of humanity. Great art, truly great art, is transformative and leaves the viewer forever changed for the better, and not always by the art itself, but by the thoughts and feelings the viewer takes away from the experience.
What effect do you hope you work has on viewers?
I hope that these images I create leave the viewer in a more meditative, introspective state of mind. Fractals by their very nature lead the viewer deeper and deeper inside, and that’s where I think my work has the greatest effect, in bringing people inwards to a more serene place.
(Unrelated) What about the current Hillary Clinton email scandal? Would you say she’s guilty of one or more crimes?
You mean Monica Lewinsky’s ex-boyfriend’s wife whose running for president? I’d say she’s no guiltier of any crime relating to our government than any other of the self-absorbed tools we’ve elected into office. I would say, however, that Hillary’s greatest crime is bringing back the pants suit into the general zeitgeist, and resurrecting polyester as a viable fashion statement for Middle America.
How can people contact you for further information and ordering?
The best way to get a hold of me these days is by sending me a message from my Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/TechnoVisionsAbstractArts or my Etsy Store at https://www.etsy.com/shop/TechnoVisionsFractal /. Either place has a fair sampling of my current work, but I’m constantly creating new images and don’t often get around to updating the websites, especially the Etsy store. Email me at technovisions@cox.net as well. Seriously, any way you can get a hold of me, get hold of me if you’d like to start a conversation about purchasing this work. You’d bring tears to my eyes if you did.
How did you get involved with RAW artists and their upcoming showcase in Phoenix?
You know, I’ve been making fractals for 25 or so years now, and never gave it much thought beyond what I could see on a monitor, but I happened to be out shopping for a frame last February and I stumbled into this little frame shop in south Scottsdale that had this gigantic rendering of a Hubble image laid out on the workbench. As it turned out, he’d printed it himself and showed me this behemoth ink printer used to print giclee’s with. One thing led to another, and before long I was sending 10, 15 pictures a week his way to have printed up. He encouraged me to start an online store at Etsy, (which I’d never heard of before) and felt that if I would I’d surely start selling some of these images.
I procrastinated all spring, but in the beginning of the summer, I thought I needed to find some way to pay for my new found printing addiction, so I took a few weeks and built a store and a face book page, and it wasn’t very long after that that the Local director for RAW, Anabelle Dimang, sent me a message basically falling all over herself about how wonderful she thought my work was and how she’d love to have me be part of their next showcase. Being the curmudgeon that I am, I was skeptical and unbelieving, but the more I looked into the organization, the more I realized that they, and the opportunities’ they presented to artists, were real, so I signed on and haven’t regretted a moment of it since. From having my first image printed only seven months ago to being discovered and showcased by RAW has been nothing short of a miracle to me �C a very weird, oddly timed miracle for a man old enough to be the father or grandfather to most of the other artists represented (and no, I didn’t know your mother in college, so keep on looking).
Mike’s work can be viewed at the RAW fashion and art show this coming Thursday September 17 from 7:00pm to 12:00am at the Monarch Theatre at 122 E Washington Street in Phoenix.
| }
|