Hexagonal Limit - Bat Fractal I
Edition 3/8
- Archival Pigment print on Bamboo Awagami Washi paper
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118 x 84 cm
(46.46 x 33.07 in)
- Richard Hassell
- From Hexagonal Limit - Bat Fractal I
This print uses one of Escher’s favourite colour schemes, for a very different geometry. This uses a 6-fold geometry, with a kite form. The bats emerge in a spiral out of a point, fly across the hexagonal world, and disappear into another point, very much like how real bats fly out of caves in a spiral as they head out to feed at night.
The geometry here is not a known fractal, and it is part of a family of fractals I have been playing with which approach geometrically simple limits, rather than infiinity complex limits, as the Koch Snowflake and other forms do. The real challenge in this one was to get the arcs of bats working, so that they not only fly in arcs of one colour, but arcs of the same colours are never touching. I never found a procedure for it, it was more a mind bending test-and adjust procedure. The tiling, while of course in theory is infinite, has been made with over 300,000 tiles, and was at the limit of what my computer could manage with its image processing. However, in vector format it is incredibly parsimonious, the whole image can be described in less than one megabyte of data in vector format.
- Collections: Strange Creatures: Complex Tessellations