Fractal Drip Paintings: Art Meets Science
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News Release - School of Physics,
University of New South Wales
Tuesday 8th February 2000
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Throughout a decade of remarkable
artistic development, stretching from 1943 to 1952, the American
painter Jackson Pollock generated a vast body of distinct art work
by rolling large canvases across the floor of his windswept barn
and dripping household paint from an old can with a wooden stick.
In contrast to the broken lines painted by conventional brush contact
with the canvas surface, Jackson Pollock poured a constant
stream of paint onto his horizontal canvases to produce uniquely
continuous trajectories. Although
this technique initially polarised opinion, in the fifty years since
Pollock's last major drip paintings were created both art historians
and the public have come to recognise his patterns as a revolutionary
approach to aesthetics.
However, it wasn't
until last year that the defining visual character of his patterns
was identified as being fractal. Many of Nature's patterns are also
fractal, earning fractals the dramatic title of 'the fingerprint
of God'. Examples include coastlines, clouds, flames, lightning,
trees and mountain profiles. Fractals are referred to as a new geometry
because the patterns look nothing like the traditional Euclidean
shapes (such as circles, squares and triangles) which humanity has
clung to with such familiarity and affection. In contrast to the
smoothness of artificial lines, fractals consist of patterns which
recur on finer and finer magnifications, building up shapes of immense
complexity.
Labelled as 'Fractal
Expressionism', the discovery of fractals in Pollock's drip paintings
has triggered a multi-disciplinary debate over the precise process
that Pollock used to generate his fractal patterns. For art theorists,
the artistic significance of Pollock's fractals lies in the generation
process. His process also offers an intriguing comparison for scientists
studying fractal generation in Nature's systems. For psychologists,
the process represents an investigation of the fundamental capabilities
and limits of human behaviour. How did a human create such intricate
patterns with such precision, twenty-five years ahead of their scientific
discovery?
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