Jackson Pollock and fractals

In his book In Pursuit of Elegance, Matthew E. May tells the story of how abstract artist and physicist Richard Taylor discovered that Jackson Pollock’s drip paintings are much more than random splatters on canvas.  The following is a summary of this story:

In February of 1995, Richard Taylor and his classmates of the Manchester School of Art were assigned to England’s Yorkshire moors to paint the landscapes. Facing the uncooperative winter weather, they were forced to create an alternative to sitting outdoors and painting.  Instead, they decided to build a wind-driven pendulum that, when caught by a gust, would drip paint from a suspended bucket to the empty canvas below. After waiting out the storm, the group returned to the scene to find that the wind had painted a Jackson Pollock.

Now this discovery in and of itself is far from shocking.  Dripping paint often calls to mind the iconoclastic spatters of Pollock’s work.  Drawing from his prior study in physics, however, Taylor was instantly able to recognize that the wind had, in fact, painted fractal patterns.  Could this also be true of Pollock?  Taylor took high-res photos of Pollock’s work and entered them into a computer.  He analyzed the painting at various scales and magnifications, comparing the fractal dimensions at each, and discovered that every single one of Pollock’s paintings illustrated fractal patterns over the entire painting.

Taylor continued his studies by having students try their hand at re-creating a Pollock.  He needed to prove that fractal patterns were not simply the result of dripping liquid on a canvas. What seemed at first to be an easy task turned out impossible: not a single student was able to create a fractal pattern.  In fact, the only way to create fractal drip paintings without a computer was the pendulum in the wind (or the mechanized version of this known as the Pollockizer). Taylor decided it was time to study the artist and his personal creative process.  May writes:  ”Based on his analysis of documentary films and observations of those witnessing Pollock in action, Taylor knew Pollock created a painting by first pouring streams of paint in discrete islands of trajectories distributed across the canvas, followed by longer extended trajectories that joined the islands, slowly and gradually building up layer upon layer of paint…He would then stop work for hours or days, returning at a later time to drip more paint, a process similar to the patterned fits and starts of the winds that generated Taylor’s snowstorm painting.”

Finally, it was time to ask: Are human beings more inclined toward natural patterns?  Taylor studied this as well, conducting dozens of experiments which asked people to state their preference between fractal and non-fractal patterns.  In a study of 120 people, 113 preferred fractal patterns.  Further studies proved that most people preferred fractal dimensions between 1.3 and 1.5.  While most of us are generally unaware of natural patterns such as fractals, it seems like we are being drawn to them nonetheless.

Of his own process Pollock said, “My concerns are with the rhythms of nature.  I am nature.”  Yet Pollock knew nothing of fractals.  He was painting them twenty years before their discovery. He didn’t need mathematical or scientific knowledge to utilize this.  ”My painting does not come from the easel,” he said.  ”On the floor I am more at ease.  I feel nearer, more part of the painting…It is only when I lose contact with the painting that the result is a mess. Otherwise, there is pure harmony, an easy give and take, and the painting comes out well.”