A year later, an emergency crash landing which severely compressed his spine, unleashed the previously undetected spinal tuberculosis which led to his turning to art, and which ultimately, in 1994, ended his life. For the next fifty years, his art drew him into life, sustained and strengthened that life, and memorialized that life. For the artist is his work and no longer human. Nature forms patterns. Some are orderly in space but disorderly in time, others orderly in time but disorderly in space.
Some patterns are fractal, exhibiting structures self-similar in scale.
Others give rise to steady states or oscillating ones. Pattern formation has become a branch of physics and of materials science, allowing scientists to model the aggregation of particles into clusters, the fractured spread of electrical discharges, and the growth of crystals in ice and metal alloys. The artists first discovered that. And long before. This artist became a choreographer of contours, the artist of a dance of form and fundamental type.