minde'R andomness is something 'seriousminded' people seldom seek. It usually crops up as a distracting by-product of a more interesting primary objective. A common tendency in one's ordered daily life, either consciously or unconsciously, is to consider randomly occurring phenomena to be merely a waste of time, uninteresting and of no practical value. This conditioned attitude is beginning to change in some scientific circles as a result of research that has shown amazing, unexpected and complex forms of order in seemingly random physical phenomena. Such research falls under the general umbrella term of 'chaos', and much is currently being written about it. The point I attempt to establish in this paper is that investigation of the concepts of randomness and complexity is, and has been for some time, the province of the creative artist as well as of the scientist. For the artist is, by virtue of the nature of the discipline itself, intrinsically involved in issues of order, compositional structure and form in all its varieties. Who would not admit to having experienced a certain aesthetic satisfaction in the apparent randomness of cloud formations, the fluttering of leaves in the wind, the arrhythmic monotony of raindrops, or even the imprints of scattered leaves left behind on a sidewalk after a cold autumn rain?Just as there is in all of us the instinct to organize events and space, there also seems to be a contrary urge to disorganize events and spaces that appear to be too rigidly structured or confining. This chaos/order paradox has been, directly and indirectly, the subject of much literature, music and visual art [1]. In nature itself an analogous paradox exists between natural shaping systems embodied in various types of polygons, spheres, helixes, spirals, meanders and branching patterns, and the apparently random and curiously fascinating natural events described above. Scientific activity over the last 10 years has focused on such complex phenomena as the long-term behavior of weather, turbulence in fluid and chaotic vibration. Whereas in years past such phenomena would have been rejected as hopelessly complex and consigned to the periphery of scientific study, this attitude appears to be changing. Such changes hint of a new validation of other forms of investigation involving chaotic themes and informally structured processes, namely, the work of many creative artists. The fact that chaotic phenomena in nature are inherently interesting is not news to them. Many artists (e.g. Marcel Duchamp, Wassily Kandinsky, Jackson Pollock) have based entire careers on the pursuit, visualization and understanding of such complex life phenomena. Artists have long been considered to exhibit a high tolerance for ambiguity and apparent complexity. Frank Barron's [2] psychological research in the 1950s indicated that the creative artist characteristically demonstrates a confi-