ETHNO FRACTALISM

My name is Ronald Fields.  I was born in Cleveland, Ohio, and as child, I had a keen interest in art.

At age 16, on the weekends, I began to use public transportation to take trips to the Cleveland Museum of Art.  I loved seeing the great works of art which were so inspiring!  My professional art career began in 1977, as I had enrolled in art courses at the Philadelphia College of Art in Philadelphia, PA.

In 1981 I moved to Winter Haven, Florida and enrolled in additional art courses at Polk Community College.  In 2006, I was confident enough to begin exhibiting in group shows on the streets of downtown Lakeland, Florida along with other artists.  I also participated in solo and group shows in many cities in central Florida.

January 2013 was a pivotal year for me as it was the last year that I exhibited my acrylic paintings.  The paintings hung in the administration building of the City of Lakeland Transit Authority for 60 days.  After that exhibit, I was determined to learn Photoshop and Fractal software— as painting no longer offered a satisfactory medium for what I wanted to express. The sophistication and complexity of these creative software programs appealed to me.  They created an irritable curiosity that I had to explore! 

As an African American, I desired to create a new non-representational art that generates an emotional connection to African Americans equal to the connection held for representational art.  As work progressed, I discovered a method for creating African inspired patterns.  Continued efforts taught me that by incorporating the African inspired patterns with fractal designs, I could create a sophisticated Africanized design like the native Africans.  So, from 2013 to 2017, I taught myself enough about these software programs to evolve into a style that I can truly call my own. 

I named the style...ETHNO FRACTALISM.