IN this remarkable and unrecognizable landscape, I have captured the father of the fractal in the act of breaking wind. Benoit Mandelbrot famously found what came to be known as the "Mandelbrot set", while researching his love of nature and the fact that in nature, nothing is smooth. So it should not come as any surprise, to art lover or mathematician alike, that the landscape of this genius's buttock is not smooth either, rather bristling with the complexity and geometry of his own mathematical miracle. Once you are fully entrenched in the world of fractal geometry, and how it is present in nature and in our lives, the next logical steps to recognizing these shapes. Reaching beyond fractals, lies particles, fluid and gas motion. In the painting "Benoit Mandelbrot Breaks Wind" the simple act of passing gas is examined to reveal the inherent beauty in such an act, its resulting gaseous cloud, traveling at escape velocity while maintaining shape, and all the surrounding geometry involved. Not only the skin of the landscape is fractal, but the act itself creates and the painting captures, all the fractal shrapnel in the glorious color of all early Mandelbrot sets, that landed on so many gaudy calendars over the years. Here the microscopic world is depicted macroscopic-ally, to for once and all bring to light the magic of such a simple act. 

​

Benjamin Franklin famously wrote on the topic

I have perused your late mathematical Prize Question, proposed in lieu of one in Natural Philosophy, for the ensuing year...Permit me then humbly to propose one of that sort for your consideration, and through you, if you approve it, for the serious Enquiry of learned Physicians, Chemists, &c. of this enlightened Age. It is universally well known, that in digesting our common food, there is created or produced in the bowels of human creatures, a great quantity of wind. That permitting this air to escape and mix with the atmosphere, is usually offensive to the company, from the fetid smell that accompanies it. That all well-bred people, therefore, to avoid giving such offense, forcibly restrain the efforts of nature to discharge that wind.