I have always filled blank pages and school notebooks with doodles. In my early college days (c1985) when I was starting to have my stories and poems published, I did a lot more experimenting with art. Like everything else in my life, I could never settle into one single style. Repeating things over and over was the last thing I ever wanted to do…

Over the years, most of my work did fall into a few categories. I will post little samplers of these as I describe each style below.

Doodles / Cave Art

Yeah, there were always doodles, but they evolved into a particular style, and I found that a doodle plus a smart-aleck comment would qualify as a one-panel cartoon, so I put out a variety of these, mostly as filler art for small publications. If they had a few inches left on a page, they could always use one of these.

When I moved to San Diego in 1987, I took anthropology courses and found a fascination with the petroglyph and pictograph art from around the world, most notably in the Southwest USA. I enjoyed doing sketches from photos, as many of the early ethnographers had done in their monographs. Soon, I had a pretty large iconography to play with. Figures of this sort would appear in later works.

I would never describe these as sophsticated. They’re just my personal visions, and I hope they have a nostalgic flair of some kind.

Detailed Illustrations

I sometimes found time to spend a few hours doing detailed illustrations with crosshatching. I was never very good at people, but I created some interesting creatures, spaceship and landscapes.

Photo Stacking

I have always done a lot of photography, but sometimes when looking a folder full of photos, I will start to see overlays. While I could never afford PhotoShop, there were affordable tools like Paint Shop Pro (especially v8) and GIMP. I enjoy stacking photos into layers and using simple filters to get the photos to interfere with each other. It can turn ordinary places into strange glimpses of other worlds. And the occasional “Photoshopping” to change the color palette, add words or elements. Some of these would qualify as Weirdcore these days.

Geometrics/Mandalas

With either photographs or raw geometric patterns, I always enjoyed making kaleidoscopic images or mandalas from simple materials. This involves placing imaginary mirrors onto the images, sometimes letting the software rotate the base image 5 or 8 or 10 times to produce strangely skewed star-shaped things. While you could argue that this is just eye candy, some of my favorite book covers were created this way. There is a lot of trial and error, though in an afternoon I might produce over 100 variations from a few starter images, but only a few really pop out.

Fractals

Like so many other things in my life, I got into fractal art a few years after everyone seemed to stopped caring about it. Decent software (Ultra Fractal) became available, and I started exploring with some fantastic results. This is not AI art. It may be computer generated from pure mathematical functions, but you have to dive into the shapes and explore the small tangled spots and isolated peaks, to try and find the places of perfect chaos or form. It feels like photography, really, trying to get just the right shots and balance. And a final stage of sorting through hundreds of palettes to find the one where the essence of the piece snaps into focus. I also have series of black & white fractals of reduced complexity, meant for b&w interior filler art for zines.

Here is a link to my old Fractal Expressions website. I will try to fold that into this new site soon.

And an even older graphics site with a few more samples.