The term strange attractor is used in the mathematical field of dynamical systems to study bifurcations in paths of multiple dimensions. It’s also used in the study of Chaos Theory, of which I have been long enamoured. My now defunct monthly “fringe” print magazine was called Chaos Review, and some of my contributing editors criticized me for using the term “chaos” because it wasn’t a household word back then. But like the proverbial butterfly flapping its wings in China and causing a storm/ hurricane in North America, my little rag made its way to at least 3 continents and as many as 10 countries. It had legs. Some ideas just do.

An idea that has recently had legs is the 1000 paintings project, which Brian Clark at Copyblogger has writing about thoroughly. The project, as I’ve mentioned previously, consists of 1000 paintings on canvas. Each canvas has one number, 1 to 1000, painted on it in blue.

As a math geek, I was actually surprised that I found Sala’s works of art wholly unaesthetically pleasing. But then, I’m a big fan of American Erotic Humorist Tom Robbins, who always questions what is art (and religion). If I was forced to choose the work of one author to read on a deserted island, it would be either Tom Robbins or Herman Hesse. But I digress.

After reading about Sala’s one thousand paintings, something started brewing in a background process in my mind, and finally manifested today. I’m going to produce 1000 e-paintings, all done in the digital domain, at a minimum of 1 per day, sometimes more. I’m using a piece of open source software for my digital canvas. And like Sala’s sequence of numbers, each e-painting is part of a sequence. One e-painting spawns the next one, produced by slightly changing a few chaotic parameters.

Now I’m not fooling myself that any of these are great e-paintings, but I find some of them deeply inspiring views of the universe. And on the slim chance that you, dear reader, find one you really like, I’m more than happy to create a larger digital copy for you if you donate at least $20 to a children’s hospital. When you do, email me a photo of the receipt, and I’ll keep a running total of all donations as well as send you the large e-painting. (I’ll be rendering the large paintings on a dual-processor desktop with 1 gig of RAM, but if you want poster-size, a painting may take several hours. So I’ll email all pending .zip files at the end of each calendar week for convenience.)

To keep the large copy of each e-painting unique, only the first person that emails a picture of their donation will get the painting. However, everyone is more than welcome to reuse/ republish copies of the original “small” images appearing on this website.