Jos de Mey: Illusionistische Malerei

A great book Jos de Mey: Illusionistische Malerei was issued by Edition Virgines in Düsseldorf in 2010. The book describes the life and work of Belgian artist Jos de Mey who devoted his life to drawing impossible figures.

Jos de Mey (1928-2007) studied at the Royal Academy of Fine Art in Ghent (Belgium). Then he spent 39 year to teaching interrior design and color there. Since 1968 he had concentrated in art. He spent a lot of time on the image of various mathematical relations such as golden section and Fibonacci sequence. He created many artworks with Pythagoras trees. In the past of 1970s he began to draw impossible figures. He depicted very realistic impossible figures in traditional Flemish environment.

The book contains 235 images of artworks of Jos de Mey from private collections. Images cover entire period of his creativity work from 1960s until his end. Also, the book contains full artist biography with 30 photos of Jos de Mey, bibliography, articles of Jos de Mey and his friends. Changing of artist's style can be traced in the chronilogical artwork index.

You can buy the book at Edition Virgines or at Amazon.de.

Below, you can see some photos of the book.

Fractal architecture

Not only abstract images can be created with fractals, but also very impressive images of strange towers and temples. Some time before I posted fractal image of a fractal temple. Now, the next some surrealistic images of fractal towers are represented below.

Medieval fractal (by Ramiro Perez)

Sunset Castle (by Ramiro Perez)

Ivory Tower - 2 (by Stefan Vitanov)

Airy (by Stefan Vitanov)

More images of fractal architecture can be found at

http://rfractals.net/?page_id=64 (Ramiro Perez)

http://www.fractalexperience.com/show_gallery.php?gallery=18&range=5&page=1 (Stefan Vitanov)

Mandelbulb

The Mandelbrot set is one of the most known fractal. It can be seen on many sites and images over the Internet. It was represented in many variations. Today, many fractal artists create beautiful images, which are based on it. But all this time it remained only a two dimensional fractal.

Of course, many artists created 3D images with it. Below you can see the Mandelbrot fractal (to the left) and such pseudo-3D. But as you can see, the figure to the right is the same 2D fractal, in which values of the fractal are representes as levels above the base plane.

It remained two-dimensional until Daniel White and Paul Nylander constructed a three dimensional analog of the Mandelbrot set, using an hypercomplex algebra based on spherical coordinated, when in classic Mandelbrot set algebra of complex numbers were used. They called their creation Mandelbulb.

You can read about history of creation of Mandelbulb and many images of it at http://www.skytopia.com/project/fractal/mandelbulb.html. Here, there are very large image of the fractal wholly and images of some it's parts.

The Mandelbulb opended the door to a new class of wonderful fractals.

Artforms of Nature and fractals

The nineteen century German biologist Ernst Haeckel is famous for his fantastically illustrated book Artforms of Nature. The copyright for this book from 1904 has now expired and thanks to Wikimedia Commons it is available for everyone to appreciate.

Haekel's artistic interpretation of the biological forms he studied have a clarity of symmetry and detail that has been a source of inspiration for many artists and engineers over the years. They provide the perfect subject matter for Photoshop plugin Pixel Bender Fractal Explorer. The plugin was created by Tom Beddard.

Below, you can see the original image of Ophiodea (to the left) and fractal based on the original images, which created with help of Pixel Bender Fractal Explorer. The fractal has the same symmetry as the original image.

Another example, the Phaeodaria and two fractals, which are based on it. Fractals have another type of symmetry, but, nevertheless, they are look very natural.

Mini books of Anatoly Konenko

Yesterday, I received the smallest book of those that I have ever hold in my hands, which is entitled as "Secrets of impossible figures". The dimensions of the book are 3x5 cm. You can compare it's size with a 1 euro coin on the photo above. The book is filled of images of impossible figures. It was published in very limited edition, only 30 copies.

The author of the book is Anatoly Konenko from Omsk (Russia). He is famous for his mini and micro works. He began to create mini and micro artworks since 1981. He invented technology of writing on rice and poppy grains and later on human hair. He have done many micro works in various styles - graphics, sculpture, carving on wood and bones, juvellery and knitting.

The field, in which Konenko is well known, is creating and publishing of mini books. He have done more than 200 mini books since 1994. All his books have high quality binding and inimitable elegant ornaments and decorations. With the publication of his books Anatoly Konenko is an artist, designer, engraver and bookbinder at the same time.

In 1996 he created the smallest book the world with sizes 0,9 x 0,9 mm, which was signed in the Guinness book. The photo of the book you can see below.

Visit web site of Anatoly Konenko to see more photos of miniatures, books, and impossible figures.