Pollock and fractals

[Norman Watts <Norman_Watts@zzzzzzz>]

Though not really related to the topic of stone, I think the
following may be of interest to the artists in the group. In the
current issue of the British journal Nature there is an article about
the paintings of Jackson Pollock who worked in the 1940s by pouring
and dripping paint onto canvas. And while the paintings may look
random to some he maintained that he was in control and that the
paintings were no accident. Pollock was also an alcoholic with a
chaotic lifestyle and this lead him to sometimes barter his paintings
for groceries. As a result several of his paintings may still be out
there to be attributed. He had numerous imitators and given his fame,
and the value of his paintings (tens of millions of dollars), there
is a lot at stake.

Pollock used various brushes, sticks and even punctured tubes to
fling the paint, apparently painting in a sort of off-balance manner,
using his whole body to get the motion right. Richard Taylor, a
physicist who also has a degree in art theory, has done a fractal
analysis of Pollock's paintings and come to the conclusion that
Pollock was right. He was in control. Fractal analysis is a
mathematical way of describing shapes such as plants, estuaries,
coastlines and so on. The main characteristic of fractals is that
they are self-similar (repeating) at different, or even all, scales.
Taylor put a grid over photographs of known Pollock paintings, as
well as background splatters, random drips on the studio floor, and
paintings of known imitators and then analyzed them. The conclusion
seems to be that Pollock not only had a distinct "fingerprint",
arising from his body's motion (force, angle, chosen height) but that
he was in control. The "fractal dimension",  as it is called, of his
paintings also increased with age. It seems Pollock was working on
fractals long before anyone invented the mathematics to analyze what
he did, and he was refining his technique and adding greater
complexity. Did he know?

It makes one wonder if something unexpected like that may lie in the
tooling marks and organic shapes that carvers make. Given the human
mind's natural ability to work with and identify patterns maybe this
explains expert's ability to visually identify his work. It also
makes one wonder if an artist can unknowingly and maybe knowingly
incorporate more into their work than initially thought. It seems far
fetched, but so is the idea of identifying Pollock's fingerprint -as
well as the notion that he was in control of it.

n