Before long, the compliment engines of Fractalbook were mass-producing such images on a scale dwarfing greeting cards. Over time, Allison’s style, coupled with the popularity of UF, became the dictionary photograph for the word fractal. At their best, they transcend a beauty-is-all aesthetics and reach to be about something - to express ideas or suggest connections to the natural world. Her images are elegant flourishes of light - highly decorative. Softer, natural shapes replaced harder-edged geometric forms and angles. But one doesn’t have to look far in our modern world to find nurturing men, who care for their children and aggressive women who climb mountains.Īllison took Fractint forms and ran them through her own UF filter - more curves, more saturation, more light. And for the “feminine” the standard is: curvy, rounded, smooth, organic, soft, floral, flourishes, motherly, nurturing… etc. Typically in design the stereotype for “masculine” follows with angularity, straight lines, phallic forms, squares, roughness, etc. Although O’s gender is unknown (to me, anyway), and stereotypes aside, a differentiation between masculine and feminine styles might be in order here. The image above by prodigious Fractint artist O shows the foundation for what would become the early-UF Allison-influenced style. The spiral image is crisp and clear its composition unfolds in dark tones with hard, defined lines. By annexing Fractint formulae, Allison was able to build on established pattern recognition and use the additional graphic firepower of UF to launch her own vogue. Early on, Ultra Fractal built its commercial software to take advantage of Fractint’s open source graciousness. More likely, it was indirectly appropriated. Not that Allison necessarily ripped her style from whole cloth. ![]() To have had such a profound effect on any artistic discipline is a considerable achievement. I’ve been hard on the FUC and its rigid notions of fractal imagery, so some readers might think I am being snarky here. Subsequently, the production of fractal art took on guild qualities, as Tim laid out earlier in a series of posts on Orbit Trap, and imitators swelled Fractalbook to churn out self-similar kudzu while social networking. Her work made with early iterations of Ultra Fractal established a touchstone in the public mind for what a fractal was supposed to be - swirly and decorative ornamentation filled with light. Her fractals became the template de rigor for the Fractal Universe Calendar (FUC) - the long-running staple of fractal art mass marketing. No one to date has had a more profound effect on fractal art style than Linda Allison.
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