Permanent collection · est. 2026
Fractal Atelier
Six meditations on the Julia set — iterated light,
hung and framed like oil on linen.
No brush touched these surfaces. Each work is a single equation — z ↦ z² + c — asked the same question several hundred times per point of the canvas: do you stay, or do you leave? The answers, and how quickly they arrive, are the only pigment used. What follows is a matter of framing, patience, and knowing where to stand.
The atelier asks that visitors touch the works. Click any canvas to enter its viewing room.
The Collection
six works · one seed eachThe mathematics · one map, every painting
Where the seeds live
Every canvas in this building is governed by a single complex number — the seed, c. Move it by a hair's breadth and the whole painting reorganises. The collection is six choices of c, nothing more.
The map at hand is the Mandelbrot set: the catalogue of every Julia painting that can exist. A seed taken from inside yields a connected work, one unbroken cloth of boundary; a seed from outside scatters into dust too fine to hang. All six seeds were gathered from the shoreline between the two — the only district where the weather is interesting.
brass pins mark the collected seeds
select one to walk to its wall
The pigment · how the palettes were curated
Mixing light, not paint
No pigment is ground in this studio — only light is mixed. Each work owns a single cosine curve through colour space, four coefficients long: a sets the resting tone, b the reach, d the phase where light enters the ramp.
Curation ran under three house rules. One period only — the frequency is pinned to one, so no palette repeats itself inside a work. Dark at zero — every phase is tuned so the ramp begins in shadow: distant pixels fall to the wall, and only the reluctant ones, the filaments that almost stayed, carry the light. Matte interiors — the filled set wears its own palette's peak tone dimmed to five percent: a tinted black, so each work rests on a wall of its own pigment.
strips rendered live from each work's coefficients · hover to widen
Colophon
Medium
Iterated complex polynomial, rendered per-pixel in a GLSL fragment shader. No image files — every surface in this building is computed live, in your browser, at the moment you look at it.
Pigment
Cosine gradient palettes, one per work, mixed against smooth escape-time. Interiors are kept dark and matte, the way a gallery keeps its walls.
Provenance
Each seed c was chosen by hand from the boundary regions of the Mandelbrot set, then framed at its repelling fixed point — the still eye of every spiral.
Fractal Atelier · built with WebGL, GSAP & patience · 2026