Robert Erlandson

My work is best described as digital collage. Fractal images are core elements in all these works. The following statement by Friedrich Nietzsche is an insightfully unexpected introduction to fractals.

“You must have chaos within you to give birth to a dancing star.”

In 1975 the mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot gave a name to the forms created by chaos, fractals. Finally, a word to describe mountains, waves, shorelines, snowflakes, trees, and yes, dancing stars in the dark night sky.

The art I create is a visual metaphor for a spectrum of feelings. Sometimes a fractal image says it all. More often, the fractal images need support from photographic elements, digital drawings and perhaps words. Thereby forming a digital collage.

The digital images are printed on metal, acrylic and a variety of high quality photographic papers. The printed medium adds to the visual metaphor. Each medium provides a different quality in terms of texture and color intensity.