Robert Fathauer
I'm fascinated by certain aspects of our world, including symmetry, chaos, and infinity. The use of mathematics in my art, particularly tiling, fractals, and knots, helps me explore these topics. I combine traditional art forms like phototography with digital techniques to create designs that I feel are an intriguing blend of complexity and beauty.
"Fractal Tree No. 7" was constructed by graphically iterating a photographic building block created from photographs of the skeleton of a cholla cactus. The building block was designed to allow seamless mating of smaller to larger copies, and a sufficient number of iterations were performed that the image is indistinguishable from an infinitely-detailed fractal.
This design was created from a fractal tessellation of spiral tiles. The tiles were decorated with knot graphics to create a fractal design with an infinite number of interwoven spirals. The outlines of the original tiles are not visible in the final design.
This artwork is based on a fractal tessellation of kite-shaped tiles I discovered several years ago. Grouping of the kite-shaped tiles into spirals allowed a fractal tessellation to be created in which two colors were sufficient to ensure that no two adjacent tiles have the same color. All of the spirals in the print have the same shape (more precisely, they are all similar in the Euclidean plane).