The tools in 84-year-old Renata Spiazzi’s spacious art studio at her home on Torrey Pines Road are now primarily three computers and a 44-inch Epson printer. The Italian-born artist has put away her oil paints, marble chisels, bronze slabs and canvases for computer programs like Photoshop, Ultra Fractals, Kai Software and Apophysis. Spiazzi uses the software to create an inventory of colorful fractals, which she later overlaps and interlaces to create rather abstract compositions. A fractal is a shape or pattern comprised of miniature replicas of itself. A snowflake and Romanesco broccoli are both examples of fractal patterns. “When I feel that I have a shape that is worthwhile, I start experimenting, overlapping different images with different backgrounds and I create my compositions. This operation takes sometimes several images or even fragments to finally have a message. I think there should be a message in every composition or the work is just a pretty object,” Spiazzi wrote on digitalartguild.com. “When God created the universe he started with a fractal,” Spiazzi said about one of her compositions called “Creation,” in which she swirls rainbow fractals to paint an image of the beginning of time. “[The art] should communicate a feeling, and in choosing abstractions I feel the viewer could compare my work to a piece of music,” Spiazzi continued. “Like in music, there are no flower pots or seascapes or pretty dancers. There are lines and shapes, that through their meaning, transmit feelings and emotions.” When a friend gave Spiazzi a computer in 1990, she wasn’t afraid to explore the digital world even though she had spent the past 30 years teaching tactile arts like sculpture, painting and handicrafts in the San Diego Community College District. She read the manual and became engrossed in using the new, technological tools for creating art. Plus, the new art form wasn’t as messy as oil and acrylic paints. “People who have computers say, ‘I want to do this, too,’” Spiazzi said. “But I’ve been doing this all my life.” Spiazzi collaborates with fellow artists and shares her work online as a member of the international Digital Art Guild at digitalartguild.com. She says galleries aren’t too keen on printed art since the older versions of ink usually faded within a week, even though Spiazzi said the ink has since improved. So, Spiazzi displays her work wherever it’s wanted. She overlapped images of San Diego with fractal patterns for the City Attorney’s Office and plans to hang a few pieces at the Treasury Department office downtown. She is preparing for an 80-piece art show at Poway Center for the Performing Arts in May. In La Jolla, Spiazzi recreated Belle Baranceanu’s mural “The Seven Arts” for the school’s auditorium after the mural was destroyed in an earthquake. Spiazzi’s house is a testament to her life as an artist. Her sculptures, paintings, embroideries and quilts decorate each nook and cranny. She even designed her front door, which she carved the five rivers of life into. Spiazzi and her husband of 57 years, Mario, moved to La Jolla in 1958 to be close to the ocean. Spiazzi grew up in Trieste, Italy, where she was trained in oil painting, drawing, pottery, sculpture and jewelry-making. She also learned to sew, embroider, knit and crotchet. Spiazzi is willing to sell her fractal artwork but that’s beside the point. “I’m interested in the search … I’m interested in the science,” Spiazzi said.