Creating a series of images is a contradiction to the way I normally work – which is to let the fractal shapes and colors surprise me into a kind of obsession. However, a new coloring method was recently released by Mark Townsend that surprised me continually and I noticed that in those surprises, figures began appearing. The first image was a version of Sheba which I discarded, zoomed out to maximum and found all the rest of the images within that basic set of layers and parameters-- adding transforms, some new gradients, one new texture sparingly. The rest of the images appeared almost in the order they are shown here. Lilith was first, Hagar was last. Sheba was added next to last, changed and generally agonized over, when I realized that a series of female archetypes from the Western religious tradition needed a final statement that looked out, away from the internal, emotional intensity of the others. Though it may not be apparent, I consider these to be figurative images, with an attempt to convey the bodies and faces of real women. Interestingly, Lilith and Hagar, the first and last I created and intentionally linked in color, seem to me to be the most abstract.
