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Artist Accolades: Renderosity member Rykk [Rick Spix] wins the 2006 Donnie award!

Mar 11, 2006 at 12:00 am by nickcharles

The Museum of Computer Art [MOCA] held it's sixth annual digital art contest, The Donnie 2006, with Renderosity's Fractal artist Rykk [Rick Spix] taking first place! With a prize of $1000.00, it may not be the only thing worth shouting about. Could this possibly be a sign of the tide turning on the general acceptance of Fractal Art? Read on as Rick talks about his win, and expands on this issue facing Fractal artists.
Message2240093.jpg What was your first reaction to your win?
I just about fell out of my chair! I was almost too nervous to even look. The money wasn't the issue with me: it was that I'd actually won with such stiff competition and awesome pieces of art that were entered. Money will leave you in days but memories, and the printed-out page [laughs], last a lifetime.

What made you decide to enter the contest?
Someone mentioned the "Donnie" Award in an e-mail on one of the lists I frequent. So I asked, "What's a Donnie"? Then I went to the supplied link and I realized that it was the Museum of Computer Art site that I hadn't been to in quite a while. I then remembered that I'd thought about entering the contest the next time it happened. I was fortunate that someone brought it up, or else I would have forgotten again. I tend not to go many places on the internet other than Rendo, my other galleries, Yahoo Games, and CNN. I probably wouldn't have gone to the MOCA site until it was much too late to enter. Thanks again, Panny!

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"Bedrock"
Why did you finally choose to enter "Bedrock"?
I really stressed out a lot over what to enter. I narrowed it down to three candidates that I thought might do okay. They were "Arcane Carvings", "Easy Like Sunday Morning" and, of course, "Bedrock". I wanted to enter an image that wasn't really very recognizable as a fractal like spirals are. My printer told me once that browns are "all the rage" among art judges these days (I really like them, too). He should know though, as he makes a living selling large format Photoshop photo-manipulations and photographs at art festivals. I looked over the pieces chosen in previous years also, to try and get a sense of what the likely judges for this year might be looking for. That was pretty inconclusive.
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"Easy Like Sunday Morning"
In the end I decided against "Easy" because, though it was a very popular image and has a lot of colors, it was too obviously a fractal spiral and wasn't very "artsy". I then ran my other two choices past a few fractal artists with art show experience whom I respected. I had been leaning towards "Bedrock" from the very start, and when they mostly picked it over "Arcane Carvings" it confirmed my hunch, so that's the one I entered. In retrospect, I think that the fact that it was very different from anything else entered and maybe because it was the only entry that was in a portrait orientation may have helped. The original name of the image was "Prehistoric" but I changed its name to "Bedrock" after seeing that there was already an entry named "Prehistory". Too close and I didn't want any confusion. Actually, its first name was "Bedrock" since it was made as Hurricane Wilma was bearing down on us last year (Wilma...Flintstones...get it? Yeah, I won't quit my day job! [laughs]), and because it has an abstract sort of "One Million BC" vibe to it.

Was there any specific motivation/inspiration behind the image?
Not really. It was more one of those things that just happens, and then takes you where it wants to go. As with most of my fractal art pieces, the initial spark comes from a shape that you make that hits your creative imagination smack between the eyes, and then your blackened [laughs] mind's eye supplies the rest of the story. You then work on it for days getting exactly the same vision you had to show up on your monitor screen. That's why I like making what I call compositional fractal art. You can use your imagination to create some thing, some where, or a vibe that you have envisioned in your mind's eye out of many diverse fractal pieces, layers, shapes and textures. It's why most of my work has to have a context to it, or a vibe that echoes something we have seen in life or dreams. Or it can have some recognizable shape, like an orb, that the viewer can sort of wrap their head around and hold onto amid the surrounding fractal chaos. After all, if you were to peel a 3d hemisphere like it was an apple in one continuous slice and laid the skin flat on a table, you'd have a spiral, would you not? I think that spheres are really spiral spores and are merely the way fractal spirals propagate [laughs]!

It's great to see a fractal image come out a winner, especially with a lot of the assumptions the general public has about fractal art. What are your thoughts concerning the acceptance of Fractal art?
That's a tough one, and something that has been a sore spot for many fractalists for quite a while. And, also, one of the reasons I chose to give "Bedrock" a shot at the contest, rather than something more spirally. There is this image or perception of fractal art, that it is just shapes generated by a computer program using coded math algorithms and that "the computer made the image". Though to some extent that can be maybe partially true, in a limited sense (especially for newbie fractalists or when first learning some of the easier, more "user friendly" fractal programs), the actuality is far from the perception. Using one of the more capable fractal art programs, or along with a graphics program like Photoshop or Paintshop Pro, an artist can, with much practice and experience over time, become so adept at using the programs that the creation of a piece can take place in one's mind well before the program generates even the first pixel of that image. A case in point is a piece I made recently called "Fuji-san". Not an especially fractal looking image, but every shape, piece, and texture in it is a separate fractal. I had seen an oil painting very much like it (without Mt. Fuji, the lake, and the clouds) in the newspaper in an ad for a furniture store that was also selling paintings. So I decided I would try to make a fractal scene similar to it. It's where the idea for the "bamboo", "leaves" and sort of pinkish background coloring came from.
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"Fuji-san"
I have, over the course of a few years, saved literally hundreds of fractal shapes and textures that I've made exploring different formulas and colorings, so the mountain and clouds I'd decided to put in were pretty easy. I'd made that type of thing before and could just modify something from my "layer library" (I've probably saved almost every fractal layer I ever made that was decent). The bamboo stalks were another thing altogether, especially the ribs in the stalks! I had a saved masking layer that was a long, thin straight shape that would do for the stalks, but I had to figure out how to curve them slightly so that they would look more realistic. I achieved this by using the "Spiral" mapping in the "mt.uxf" folder in Ultrafractal at a moderate twist, and centered a good distance away from the stalk shape. I then had to invent the ribs. I know pretty well what shape many of the coloring algorithms in UF will make, so I chose "Orbit Traps" (standard.ucl) with the "trap" shape set to "point", as I knew this would make round balls. I chose to use the "Simply Spirals" (tma2.ufm) formula, as I'd discovered last year that there is a certain range of seed numbers or locations that will make a spiral straighten out into a straight line of shapes. I zoomed in and stretched the round ball shapes until I had a string of long, thin ovals. Then I used the opacity controls in the Gradient Editor to turn the ovals into long hollow rings and laid that over the stalk. I masked the "ribs" to the stalk shape, added a texture pattern that I modified to give the fine lines I wanted, added a few layers for shading and shadowing, and there you go: bamboo! The purpose of all this jabbering [smiles], is to demonstrate that, although the PC produced the shapes, I, the human, told it precisely which shapes to make, where they went in the composition, what color they all were, and what parts of each shape or pattern were visible at each precise spot. In other words, Ultrafractal was merely the brush I painted with to bring to life the vision I had in my mind before I started the piece. It is the same for a good many other fractalists around the world as well. To paraphrase Kerry Mitchell, one of the long-time icons of fractal art: "Launch UF on your pc and then walk away for a few hours. When you come back there will still be a blank screen". As with an oil painter who first sketches his idea and then paints it with a horsehair brush, so too, do many digital artists starting with a vision, vibe, or idea. The only difference is the brush they use, and the medium the artist's vision is painted upon. Both require skills honed over many, many hours and years. One of my favorite digital artists, Maria Kinsey, actually sketches many of her fractal compositions or scenes on paper before she sets out to make the image on her PC. The practiced fractal artist controls nearly every aspect of what the computer paints, as if the PC actually was a paintbrush or graphite pencil. And I think there is a certain unreal surrealism to realistic fractal compositions that can't be duplicated any other way, be it by hand or by computer. Some fractals might subliminally suggest something in the real world, rather than look exactly like it. All you need is a little imagination. Also, oil painting can be a very messy thing to do in my house and, unlike oil painting, with digital art if you goof something up, there are "do overs" [laughter]!
Many thanks to Rick for taking the time out of his busy schedule for this interview. We invite you to view Rykk's Renderosity Gallery.
All supporting images are copyright, and cannot be
copied, printed, or reproduced in any manner without written permission from the artist.
Artist Accolades is where we showcase Renderosity artists on their accomplishments. If you know of someone that should be featured, please drop me, vclaszlo, a line.
March 13, 2006
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