Abandon Reason

About Abandon Reason: The Mad Apophysisian's Lair


Someone asked me the other day how I chose the name Abandon Reason for my art website. I've been dithering about an "About This Site" page for awhile, and the answer to that question seems to be a good place to start. (Thanks, Becca.)

I have never really thought of myself as an artist. Creating the header graphic for this site that reads "Digital Art by Susan Wallace" gave me the willies, made me feel like a fraud. Art, to me, was Van Gogh and Da Vinci and Rackham, Mucha, Escher, Dali. It was illuminated manuscripts and painstakingly illustrated botanicals. I had to give myself a little mental shake and remind myself that I am often guilty of taking things too literally. While we all have our own personal masters that come to mind when we think the word "art," to me it is defined simply as an expression, often a purging, of emotion.

I have been creating something (sometimes, anything!) for as long as I can remember. One of my earliest memories is of sitting at a child-sized table in my room, listening to Ferde Grofé's Grand Canyon Suite and the Broadway Original Cast Recording of Flower Drum Song as I drew with crayons on manilla drawing paper. Through the years I experimented with many different media – sculpture, several different types of needlework, watercolors, acrylics, decoupage, collage, and then later on the computer with photo manipulation, 3D images and landscapes, and finally ... fractals.

I named my early Apo fractals things like "Oh_wow" and "just_cool." I was enthused and enthralled with this new medium and could, and did, play with it for hours, days, weeks on end. However pleased I was, it wasn't pleased enough, as I continued to do research. This led me to The Fractal Art Manifesto by Kerry Mitchell, which I have read several times over in the past eight years. I wish I could pinpoint what it was about this article that made the words "abandon reason" spring to mind, but I cannot. Ha! Regardless, I scribbled them down on an index card and when the time came that I decided to create a website for my digital art, abandonreason.com seemed the perfect fit.

Over time, the joy of serendipitous discovery is replaced by the joy of self-determined creation. ~ Kerry Mitchell, The Fractal Art Manifesto

Abandon Reason: It has to do with chaos, and taming chaos, and my inclination to fight the chaos – and an admonishment to myself, to just let it go, abandon reason, go with the flow. Even now I struggle with it. Like most of us humans here on Earth there are many aspects of my life that I do not have control over. They have control over me! And so I sit and relax and the inherent chaos of fractals streams out over my screen and I try to whip it into shape. I take control. And then remind myself, this should not be work. This should be release. Relax, abandon reason; see where it takes you.

And so I do – and then the magic happens. And I start calling the little corner of my room where I create The Mad Apophysisian's Lair.

... programs like Apophysis generate a batch of images at random, for a human to sift through and find the images that evoke some thought or memory. Hundreds of images may pass by – all equally good to the computer's non-judgmental eye – until a human viewing the image sees something meaningful to them. At that point they take the image, typically working with it further, manipulating it ... somewhat like a sculptor can look at a piece of wood and see a shape lurking inside it, waiting to be exposed. Until the artist works with it, it is just a lump of wood ... or one of a hundred random fractal images. It is the human element that makes the image worth looking at ... that makes it art. ~ Kerry Mitchell, The Fractal Art Manifesto

Art. Huh.


Related Links

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Apophysis Download
The Fractal Art Manifesto
GIMP Download
Abandon Reason Shop at Zazzle


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