Cremesin? Lyra Bend? SITR? Abunda Gojo?

Do those names mean anything? Are they random splatterings of letters? Are you crazy? Why can't you use ordinary, understandable titles?

Yes. No. Probably. Because...

...fractal art, by nature, is abstract, and interpreting my art can sometimes be like taking a Rorschach ink blot test. While I might have been thinking of something in particular as I create the work, there really is no intrinsic meaning or message that I feel everyone should "get." It doesn't matter if you see something different in an image than I do, or than anyone else does, so I like to use titles that hopefully don't unduly influence the viewer's interpretation. Finding a good name for each newly completed work — one with just the right combination of lyricism and ambiguity — often takes longer than it took to create the image itself.

I start with qualities I see in the image: shapes, textures, moods — my own Rorschach interpretation — and look them up in my trusty dictionary. In the words' etymology, I sometimes find poetic spellings like Cremesin, which is the Middle English ancestor of crimson. If I don't find anything suitable for my original word, I follow the same trail for synonyms. If those are all dead ends, I start playing with anagrams, acronyms, the etymology of people names, foreign language translations, and recently, Esperanto.

Cremesin ~ Middle English for "crimson"

 
 
Lyra Bend ~ anagram of "benadryl"


SITR ~ Skittles In The Rain"

 


Abunda Gojo ~ Esperanto for "abundant joy"

Even though some of the names seem quite random, I think all but two have an actual reason for being. Some of the stories of how the names came to be are quite fun, so as I continue to update this new site, I'll add those histories to the image info.