Fracture Art

Sharing these two pieces gives me a fair amount of anxiety. And not because I'm using a 20 year old flash photograph that doesn't do them justice. It makes me nervous because this is an art style that I invented* around ~1999. I taught it to several of my classmates and one of my professors. Aside from some pretty excellent security framework in my professional life, this art style is the only movement I have ever created that actually took on some life of its own. I realized how different it was when it took actual time to teach the process, and not everyone was able to perform it. It is a part of me more than I could ever describe. When I am drawing the fractures it is calming and somehow makes my brain feel more centered.

What does NOT contribute to the anxiety is the fact that I created this form only a few years after being told I didn't have my own style. At the time I probably worried what people would say about these Fracture pieces. Now, I own it. I love this, it is mine, and it is awesome. Suck it, haters.

It's not Cubism, though it is obviously has a similar look. If I took out the background and just kept the subjects, then it would have an even stronger resemblance. However Cubism looks at a subject and paints it in a different way. This is more of an image being pulled from one of those magic eye pictures but the picture is a Rorschach ink blot. Additionally if you squint with these two pieces, the subjects disappear. That is why I enjoyed these warriors so much, as  they are apparently masters of stealth!

I call it "Fracture Art," You can see more examples under "Art -> Mixed Media" in the menu at the top of the page. There is a science behind how I draw the lines, but I'll not get into that here. There are two types, purposeful and non-purposeful. Purposeful means that you know ahead of time what subject you want to have in the piece. A lot of the time, purposeful art does not have fractures upon the whole page. It is incredibly difficult, but when pulled off it looks amazing. It is also more likely to have the artist color outside the lines to give better form to the preferred subject.

Non-purposeful is when I'll put fractures willy-nilly everywhere, and then look for a pattern to turn into the subject after all of the lines have been drawn. It is much easier, but has a lot of issues. The subject might not be in the center of the page, might be quite a stretch to make it into something, might not be very recognizable, etc. However non-purposeful art is MUCH more fun. You basically get to scribble, and then do the art version of staring at clouds and imagining that they look like things. Yes, I have literally done an non-purposeful art piece that turned out into a bunny, just as if it were a cloud. An angry bunny cloud.

The warriors were both non-purposefully inked. Then when I "saw" the warrior in one and outlined it in silver marker, I then purposefully tried to find the second warrior in the next piece and then outlined that one in silver too. The fact that I was able to make two separate Fracture Art Warriors for one project is astonishing. Maybe it means I am a little too good at manipulating ink blot tests. Maybe it means that Fracture Art is incredibly versatile. Regardless of those tho possibilities, I need to point out that I did the fracture lines for both pieces in one sitting- so it is likely that I did them fairly similarly. When you sit and draw hundreds of lines you are probably going to get into a bit of a groove.

Anyway, this post is the first public showing of this art in 20 years. I will be posting more; I have photographs of several other pieces to talk about. I have done very little Fracture Art since, and maybe I need to remedy that.

* We say in the art world that everything has already been done, which I accept (it is much like Rule 34). However, I've never found anyone who uses my style or my process that hasn't been taught by me. There are always people trying to prove me wrong in every way, so I've had a fair share of people who have found line drawings on the internet and told me, "see! Someone else has done it!" I have to reply that yes, "someone else has drawn lines before. Good find." But it is not the same intent, process nor result.