JExxon Pollock's paintings look like beautiful accidents. The 20th century artist spilled, splattered and flung paint from brushes, cans, syringes and sticks onto canvases laid out on the floor in a seemingly haphazard and uncontrolled manner. The resulting storm of emotions and colors blinded the public and made him famous.
But while art lovers admire the work, scientists have long sought to understand the laws that govern them, in part to help develop tools that could help distinguish his paintings from imitations. Recently, an international group decided to test whether his drawing method was closer to the way children or adults draw. To answer this question, they asked a group of adults aged 18 to 25 and children aged 4 to 6 to paint Pollock-style paintings by pouring paint onto canvases.
The researchers found that children's drawings done in this manner were more reminiscent of real pollock than paintings by adult artists. They published their results V Frontiers in Physics.
To reach this conclusion, the scientists used two forms of statistical analysis: fractal analysis and lacunarity. While fractal analysis measures complexity, lacunarity reveals something more subtle: rhythm and space in a complex network. Measuring lacunarity has helped scientists understand natural systems such as galaxies in the Universe. They also asked people to rate finished paintings and used the results to rate two famous works of art: No. 14Jackson Pollock and Young man intrigued by the flight of a non-Euclidean flyMax Ernst, who used his own paint pouring technique.
The researchers found that children's drawings had smaller fractal dimensions and higher lacunarity—they were simpler, had less detailed fine structure, and had more clumps, with larger spaces between clumps. The paintings of adults showed the opposite: higher fractal dimensions and less lacunarity. In other words, the adults' work had more complex, detailed patterns and the paint lines were more evenly spaced.
“Our research shows that the artistic patterns created by children differ from those created by adults using the casting technique made famous by Jackson Pollock,” said senior author Richard Taylor, a professor of physics, psychology and art at the University of Oregon, in the paper. statement. “Remarkably, our results show that children's paintings are more similar to Pollock's paintings than to paintings created by adults.”
Taylor and his co-authors suggested that differences between the performance of adults and children may be related to how balance and body coordination develop with age. When a person pours paint while leaning over a canvas, the body is constantly adjusting its balance. Because adults have more control, they make finer adjustments, resulting in more complex patterns, while children make more jerky movements.
Surprisingly, the scientists found that the more uneven and clumsy drawings drawn by children seemed more pleasant and interesting to people who were asked to rate them than the work of adults. Even more interesting are the patterns in Pollock's works. No. 14 were on the edge of the adult range, closer to the patterns found in children's drawings.
Read more: “The pleasure of patterns in art»
The famous artist's paintings were characterized by lumpier and less detailed patterns than the average adult. Pollock scholars say the artist had limited physical coordination due to a birth injury that affected his manual dexterity and coordination. Even more surprising is that Max Ernst’s work on both fractal analysis and lacunar analysis has become firmly established in children’s circles. This may be because he used a special technique, hanging the paint can like a pendulum and guiding it with his hands, limiting natural movement, the authors note.
This study was only the latest attempt to decipher Pollock's artistic process. A few years ago another team got down to business an even simpler question: did paint “drip” from Pollock at all? After analyzing extensive video of Pollock in action and attempting to experimentally replicate his painting process, they discovered that his colored lines did not actually obey the laws of fluid dynamics known as twisting instability, which apply to free-dripping liquids. Due to the interaction of gravity, inertia and viscosity, streams of viscous liquid such as honey or paint tend to curl as they drip, folding like coiled rope before spreading across the surface.
The force with which Pollock threw his paints caused them to follow a pattern known in physics as a fluid-mechanical sewing machine—yes, that technical term– because the coils move sideways in an orderly manner when they contact the surface, reminiscent of sewing patterns.
Scholars have argued that Pollock must have deliberately moved his hand at a certain speed and height and selected certain paints to prevent the paints from fragmenting before hitting the canvas.
Whether measuring balance, fractals or fluid dynamics, scientists continue to search for order in Pollock's frantic creative process. But whether his method was calculated chaos or creative madness, mathematicians say it worked.
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Lead image from: Fairbanks, Massachusetts and others. Frontiers in physics (2025).
