fractal is a shape made up of
smaller copies of itself. The copies may be exact, or distorted in some way. The process
of finding smaller and smaller copies can be continued ad infinitum. Artists have used
this concept to create lovely designs.
Kolam is a traditional Indian folk art widely used to decorate the thresholds and
courtyards in front of houses. A large number of Kolam designs posses' elegant
mathematical concepts including geometrical and number-theoretic properties. A kolam could
be made up of a single, unsegmented, closed thread of line or it could be made up of
superimposition of two or more closed threads of lines, each constituting one component of
the global kolam pattern.Kolam drawing is practised extensively in South India by women of
all ages. Children, mostly girls, learn the art of drawing kolam patterns from childhood
and could acquire an astonishingly large repertoire of designs, which they can draw
readily from memory. The designs can cover areas up to 3 meters by 3 meters. Occasionally
they consist of small patterns repeated many times, but more often thay are small drawings
connected in very sophisticated ways. Above,(top right and left) are examples of kolam
designs created out of a grid of dots.
Some people don’t considerfractal images ‘created’ on a computer (like
the decorative red poster above), as true art. One only ‘dicovers’ patterns with
the help of computers and some skillful use of colours attributed to fractal making
softwares. And that does not classify as original art they argue.
