Abstraction

Firstly, this picture is licensed under the attribution share-alike Creative Commons license. I think. I'm not sure who I should give the attribution to: Scott Draves or Ernst Haeckel. That's in Seahorse Valley, by the way, in case you didn't know.

It's often said that fractal art is an abstract art. After all it's heavily based on mathematics; the most abstract of human endeavors. However I think most fractal art is not abstract at all. Many of us are creating images of things: we give them form, we might manipulate a gradient to produce a three dimensional effect, or add a layer to produce a shadow. In our minds they are things and not simply relationships between line, shape and colour. But if they're not abstract, and they don't represent things in the "real world", then what do they represent?

Of course I can't answer that for everyone. The things in my pictures might be the things from my dreams: things I can't name; things that don't have a name.