My Rainbow Fractals are not fractals. They are simply miniaturizations and repetitions of segments of Rainbow Belt. But the principle of scale is still at work across the different versions. With each further miniaturization, the image changes significantly. I think of these as potential desktop wallpaper for those who take a little vertigo with their e-mail.
My Minoan Designs are a mixture of original images in what I hope is a Minoan style and stolen images. The Minoans from whom I stole the stolen images, however, I think are past caring. Minoan frescoes and pottery are treasure troves of design. We have so many evocative, expressive images from their culture and nothing else to go on. It is like watching an exciting silent movie with a complicated plot, big chunks missing, and no subtitles.
I got the idea for Rainbow Belt from a photo in a great book about handicrafts in colonial New England, The Age of Homespun, by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich. The photo depicted a strap of Native American design, woven in 18th-century New Hampshire of linen and dyed porcupine quills by Rachel Meloon, a European-American woman who had grown up among the Abenaki, for her neighbor, Peter Kimball, who carried it, I understand, throughout the Revolutionary War. For Rainbow Belt, I re-produced designs from Rachel Meloon’s strap, but I skipped some, made some up, and colored them differently.
I have always liked pure, traditional designs, carved latticework screens of provenance Islamic
Islamic Screen
and Indian,
Indian Jali Screen
Minoan pottery and fresco,
Neolithic cave painting,
Neolithic Cave Painting
Anasazi pottery,
Anasazi Pot
American Indian design of whatever provenance.
19th-Century Sioux Buffalo Hide Painting
Most such art is non-representational, or, as with a Mimbres hummingbird
Mimbres Hummingbird
or a Levantine rock-art spear-man,
Levantine Rock Art
abstracted.
I do not remember the original inspiration for separating the bands of images from Rachel Meloon’s strap with bands of color-spectrum-sequenced Rubin’s vases.
Rubin Vase
I suppose it had something to do with the cross-cultural nature of the artefact symbolizing the unity of mankind. Or maybe I made that up after the fact. No tracing was involved. I drew the strap designs by hand, one by one, on an 8 1/2 x 11 piece of paper, using mechanical pencil, ruler, protractor, square, compass, and Michaelangelo-style pounce stencils. The ranks of Rubin’s vase-faces were all drawn free-hand, which is why none of the faces really match, what I like to think of as a my low-rent variation on Shi Huang Ti’s Terracotta Army.
