letter to Mandelbrot

Here is a letter I wrote to professor Benoit Mandelbrot. The professor died a few month after I sent this, so I suppose he never read it or looked at the images. I will look over the blog and see if the images are there, if not I will add them. I guess I'll call it "Open Letter to the legacy of Benoit Mandelbrot".

Professor Mandelbrot,
I wanted to bring these paintings to your attention for various reasons, in a nutshell because I suspect you will be able to provide some key to understanding their meaning and importance.
While studying Fine Arts at University of Waterloo in 1992, a friend of mine, a PhD student in theoretical physics introduced me to the world of fractals, mostly through images, but also through discussion. That time was the genesis of a body of work in my painting process, producing paintings which I call “thoughtless organic”. Somehow seeing images of the Mandelbrot set produced a change in the way I saw and interpreted visual reality, and I wanted to paint about that.
Not being a mathematician, I cannot prove that my impressions were correct but it seemed to me that the Mandelbrot set images and their self similarity at any scale signalled something extremely important about visual reality. I felt that the beauty expressed in the set was connected to the way nature manifests beauty in complexity. It seemed to me that wherever I looked in nature, I could see a language of forms that became visible only through randomness, and that there was a subtle message everywhere taking shape whenever there was infinite complexity. Of course, I also began to see that infinite complexity was everywhere.
I noticed how the spontaneous beauty in the shifting patterns of nature is a very hard thing to paint, and I began a two pronged attack on these difficulties, on the one had through working very hard to represent exactly what my eye could see though painting and drawing, and on the other hand I began to develop other work painting imagery with no reference to phenomenal reality. It is the non representational work which I would like to present to you now, the culmination of 18 years of development.
It seems to me that you would be foremost among those who could recognise the “language of forms” if I have been able to generate it through my painting process. I realise that you are very busy, very much in demand, and I would not approach you, except that I have convinced myself that some absolutely unprecedented imagery has begun to appear in my “thoughtless organic” works. I am a painter and not a philosopher or a scientist, so I will not try to argue the importance of these paintings, rather I will allow the images to speak for themselves. Please share with me any insight you may have into the work, I need your help as I am not in a position to sanction the meaning or importance of the work myself.
In closing, I think it may be important to note that when I am painting these pictures, my mind is at rest with almost no thoughts, and no concepts or mental pictures of any kind about where the work is going. I do not know from stage to stage what shape the painting will take next, and there is some spontaneous process at work which generates the imagery without any visual reference or source material of any kind. I’m not sure it isn’t the same process that generates beauty in chaos in the natural world. There is a strange witness state in which I watch the images unfold, and though I do not know much about how I arrived at the stage where I can maintain this state, I have seen that it is the key to the process. Please do not hesitate to contact me with any insight or encouragement you may have to offer.
I am extremely grateful for you kind attention and time,

William Downey