Hey guyz

Welcome to the fifth edition of Meet the Fractal community !

In few words, Meet the Fractal Community is be a bi-monthly interview with an artist of our beloved fractal community.

First of all , please introduce yourself to the community.
My name is Jess, I'm 23 and I live in Montana, USA, and if you ever want to talk to me I hang out in #Aposhack a lot.

Tell me how to call you? Do you go by your Name or an artistic pseudonym?
My name is fine. A lot of people here call me Far, which is also perfectly fine. Either works for me.

How did you discover deviantART ?
As I recall, I was linked to it from a Wheel of Time fansite a very long time ago.

What is your earliest Artistic memory ?
Oh, this is a hard one. I've probably been drawing since I had the motor skill to hold a marker. When I was very little, I would go to my grandma's place and churn out like twenty drawings of random stuff and put them all on her fridge.

How did you discover fractal? And why did you want to create some ?
Well, the first time I was introduced to the term, I was in seventh grade attending this little conference meant to encourage girls to participate in math and science stuff. The presenter showed us the Sierpinski triangle, explained how to generate it via the chaos game, and that it had a non-integer dimension. This is also the first time I as introduced to the idea of different cardinalities of infinity. Overall it was pretty mindblowing for a twelve-year-old!

About a year after that, I discovered a website full of fractal desktop wallpapers. [link] This was the moment I realized that they could be turned into art. Then when I got on dA and saw the works of Nicholas Rougeux (`rougeux), I decided I wanted to make some too.

Are you empirical or academically trained?
My formal education is in English literature and creative writing; all the fractal stuff is self-taught or learned from other people on dA (primarily in #Aposhack).

What's your favorite tool of trades and why ?
Impossible to choose. I like to call myself "ambidextrous" in UF and Apophysis. Technically my first program was apo, but after about two weeks of stumbling around in it I finally managed to get my hands on a copy of UF (which was the kind of art that had drawn me to fractals in the first place). For several years I made UF fractals almost exclusively. But in the meantime, apo gained a lot more features (when I started, it didn't even have the julia variation let alone any of the fancy plugins we use today) and so sometime in 2009 the people in chat convinced me to make a serious go at learning it. Now my recent gallery is full of apo, probably 3-to-1 against UF for 2011 and 2012 cumulatively. But, I can't say whether it will continue like that. In fact, in the long run I'll probably end up switching to chaotica instead of apo. I've already been doing all my apo renders in chaotica since about April 2011.

What are your favorite kind of fractals ?
"Abstract," which annoyingly means a different thing to fractal artists than most artists. I guess most people would consider almost ALL fractals abstract. Anyway, what I mean is that I like fractals which go beyond the "typical" structures (spirals, mandelbrots, gnarls, splits/elliptic, grand julians, etc) and focus on artistry over technical stuff. I make a lot of fractals that are meant to look like paintings, or just a field of some awesome pattern with no negative space. I like it whenever I get a comment like, "I never would have guessed this is a fractal!" which is fairly frequently.

If you have to choose only one fractal in your gallery which one would it be and why ?
Oh dear, I'm currently facing this dilemma for an art show too.
It's so hard to choose but I guess for now I will go with Motet:

Do you have some tips for new comers in the fractal art world ?
It's a long haul and there's a lot to learn, so don't give up, and don't expect to be good instantaneously or even after several months or a year. Hang out in aposhack, pong params, and get to know other fractalists. Don't be intimidated by "popular people" or "big names" because most of them are super friendly. Don't be afraid of learning some fractal math but don't feel inferior if that kind of thing is difficult for you because you can still make amazing art without it. Develop an eye for image quality so you can spot aliasing or jpg artifacts from a mile away.

And last but not least, learn general art concepts like composition and color theory instead of obsessing only about fractal-specific stuff! So many people think fractal art plays by different rules and criteria, or that if you don't make fractals you can't critique fractal art, but that's not true at all. Photographers and painters who have never opened a fractal program have given me excellent artistic advice, and conversely I sometimes find that fractal artists will go on about plugins forever and never say how an image makes them feel. Don't lose sight of that.

I've got one more question for you... if you were the last one standing in the world, what would be the first thing you would do ?
A bunch of my friends and I discussed this once, and came to the conclusion that we would use a sperm bank to no longer be the last person in the world.

Being a very practical and boring person I'd probably start off by migrating to somewhere with lighter winters. Then I'd hoard a bunch of non-perishable food, find a fuel source to get some generators up and running, and start a garden or something. After I had all the survival stuff taken care of I'd probably read a lot to stave off the inevitable crushing depression and loneliness.