Featured Artist Paul McGuire

Blending math and imagination, Paul McGuire creates fractal-inspired images that reveal unexpected beauty in algorithmic form. View more on his website.

 

 

Growing up in my family of artists, I was exposed to many artistic paths: writing, painting, sculpture, architecture, music, drama. But I was the one whose interests leaned toward math and science. The CRC Book of Standard Mathematical Tables and Formulae was filled with strange trigonometric functions, which brought forth complex spirals and rosettes when plotted. Eventually I found myself looking to write my own computer software that would help me create such images.

 

 

Computer art in the 70’s and 80’s started to break out from rough renderings of the Mona Lisa printed using standard typewriter characters on a computer line printer. It expanded to Conway’s Game of Life, Dali’s analog-to-digital pixelation of Abraham Lincoln, and Mandelbrot’s The Fractal Geometry of Nature. The advent of fractal mathematics showed the ability of complex forms to emerge from simple algorithmic rules.

 

 

About this time (ca. 1985), I started my own long-running creative theme as a programming experiment. Using an algorithm called Random Midpoint Displacement, I wrote my own software. It generated contours of mountain ranges, jumbled fish nets, and crumpled paper.

 

 

For a while, my results were interesting as an academic exercise, but low in resolution, and not much to speak of visually. I explored the impact of eccentricity to vary the fractal results from a subtle disturbance in an otherwise uniform grid, to a wild chaos. I added color, and learned how my algorithm could create both smooth flows and hard boundaries.

 

 

Eventually my computer resources caught up with my algorithmic imagination. I began producing physical prints in high resolution on canvas. These differed from the early giclees of the time in that they were not digital copies of a physical artwork, but were created straight from the digital medium. I showed these pieces in Austin and Dallas, with collectors around the US and in Europe.

 

 

Fast forward to 2017, when I submitted my artwork “breath” to the Austin Art Boards call for art. “breath” was selected as one of the 10 finalists for that year, and appeared on billboards around Austin for the next 18 months. The title came from the flow and mixing of color in a fractal band across a white field. To me that band reflected a single breath of air, and how it travels and connects all of those who may feel it, watch it flutter a leaf, or even re-inhale it themselves. Little did I know how this thought would manifest in a real and global sense just two short years later.

 

 

People often find a particular work of mine that resonates with some personal image or memory. I attribute this to the similarity of the fractal landscapes and patterns to those found in the natural world, and it is these natural patterns that have individual and personal appeal. Children and adults discover hidden shapes, just as they would when looking at clouds in the summer sky.

 

 

For those who collect my works, they find that these discoveries occur long after their initial experience, continuing to make the piece new again.

 

Paul McGuire invites you to follow on Facebook, X, Bluesky and Mastodon.

 

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