Vicky Brago-Mitchell

Vicky Brago-Mitchell grew up in the Pacific Northwest of the United States, daughter of two members of the clergy who met and married in 1944 at a theological seminary in Berkeley, California. Upon graduation from secondary school, she attended Stanford University as a scholarship student and received a bachelor's degree there in Spanish language and literature in 1970. After several years of travel she settled in Japan, where she worked as a photographer and translator. When her marriage to Tokyo publisher Chikayasu Sekine ended in 1976 she returned to the US, attending graduate school in Romance Languages and Linguistics at UCLA and California State University, Fullerton, then going to work as a bilingual teacher. She speaks English, French, Spanish, Italian, German and Japanese.

Brago-Mitchell's credits as a photographer include all the pictures for a Japanese-language gardening book of plants cultivated in Japan, published by Shobunsha, Tokyo, 1975.

In 1992 she married American composer John Mitchell, and in 2000 created a website in 20 languages to showcase his music, which now receives more than 100GB of traffic a month, far more than that of any other living composer. The work in graphic arts involved in the website's design and maintenance led to her discovery of fractal art. Fascinated with the infinite possibilities of this new medium, she has devoted much of her time since mid-2003 to producing pieces that reflect her love of nature and preoccupation with questions of time and space.

My approach to fractals is related to an interest in photography--I've done a lot of it, some professionally. With fractals as with photos, I choose what to look at, I study the light and shadows, I manipulate the colors--but I am working with material that has its own structure. I'm not particularly interested in creating images that resemble real objects, although if people associate the images with something familiar they may become more accessible. What I try to do is make something that is interesting to look at, and that neither I nor anyone else has ever seen before.