![Shattered Reflections 1.png](https://files.peakd.com/file/peakd-hive/deeanndmathews/hgZctTaw-Shattered20Reflections201.png)
https://nftshowroom.com/deeanndmathews/gallery/deeanndmathews_fractal-glassine_shattered-reflections-1

Even as a child, I always thought there was something beautiful about broken glass. 

Of course, you didn't want to get cut, and of course, it meant that something somebody needed had been broken – you could never be happy about it once you were old enough to know that.

But, there was always something beautiful about the points of sharp, cutting light that had once been something else that was at least functional, and sometimes quite beautiful … a sad recognition of beauty that was, and what remains before the inevitable cleanup.

I return to this idea – the sadness of things once beautiful that cannot be put back together again – in the Shattered Reflection sub-series of my Fractal Glassine series.

One of the things that makes working in fractals so challenging is that you cannot draw in the traditional sense … a portrait of anything is very hard to create.  What you have to do is work with the patterns of fractal geometry that underlie all things seen in nature and approximate the things that you wish to create … millions of iterations of a single stroke, so much work discovering the right palette, without any guarantee that the math and the colors will yield a clear image of what you want.  But when things come together, they do come together! 

Shattered Reflections 1 is my thought about a country forced apart not just because of a pandemic, but because of the death of George Floyd, murdered by a White police officer in nine terrible minutes in front of the entire world.  Notice the beautiful colors represented in the shattered glass – and the shock of red around the neck of a fractal version of a Black male figure.  

I feel that the death of George Floyd crossed a line that I am not sure we will ever as a nation get back across … and we shouldn't ever go back.  This kind of callous disregard for Black life has to end before this nation can become what it has promised to be – what has been shattered can't be fixed, but we must work toward something better, even in the midst of these perilous times.

![Shattered Reflections 2.png](https://files.peakd.com/file/peakd-hive/deeanndmathews/ewt5q7Qy-Shattered20Reflections202.png)
https://nftshowroom.com/deeanndmathews/gallery/deeanndmathews_fractal-glassine_shattered-reflections-2


Shattered Reflections 2 came after I heard that in the middle of this pandemic, somebody decided to do a mass shooting – remember when that was happening every 9-10 days in the United States?   Whole families shattered in one terrible moment … notice the anguished figures of faces reflected in different places, juxtaposed in the midst of the breaking and the holes in the figures of the glass.  

Both of these pieces are in exactly one edition … it did not seem to me that there should be more than one of each.  No two scenes of shattered glass, and no two instances of lives shattered by senseless violence, are alike.