Masha du Toit

From my sketchbook – an angry Dragon Girl:

I was able to generate quite a few patterns from this drawing.  I’m still hopelessly addicted to making patterns.  I’m reading  Kim Stanley Robinson’s Green Mars at the moment, and I found this quote about patterns and life-force:

The quote is from a speech by Hiroko. She is the most mysterious character in the book – a sort of futuristic witch –  a biologist and genetic engineer who is as much a guru and prophetess as she is a scientist:

“Look at the pattern this seashell makes.  The dappled whorl, curving inward to infinity.  That is the shape of the universe itself.  There’s a constant pressure, pushing toward pattern.  A tendency in matter to evolve into ever more complex forms.  It’s a kind of pattern gravity, a holy greening power we call viriditas, and it is the driving force in the cosmos.”

And a little later she says:

“We rise out of the cosmos and see its mesh of patterns, and it strikes us as beautiful.  And that feeling is the most important thing in all the universe – its culmination, like the colour of the flower at first bloom on a wet morning. It’s a holy feeling, and our task in this world is to do everything we can to foster it.”

So here is me, spreading my little bit of viriditas: