Fractal or Fake? Science News Online re: Jackson Pollock & fractals

[applegrove]

Fractal or Fake?
Novel art-authentication method is challenged
Julie J. Rehmeyer
Science News Online

"Jackson Pollock couldn't possibly have been thinking of fractals when he started flinging and dripping paint from a stick onto canvas. After all, mathematicians didn't develop the idea of a fractal until a couple of decades later. But if one physicist is right, Pollock ended up painting fractals anyway. And that mathematical quality may explain why Pollock's seemingly chaotic streams of paint come together into an ordered, beautiful whole, and why the technique brought Pollock acclaim as a master of American abstract painting.

PAINTING UNDER A MICROSCOPE. Fractals are objects that look the same under magnification as they do as a whole. One researcher says that Jackson Pollock paintings have that property.
Pollock, Jackson, Number 1, 1950 (Lavender Mist), Ailsa Mellon Bruce Fund, image © Board of Trustees, National Gallery of Art, Washington



A fractal is a geometric structure in which the shapes at a large scale reflect the shapes at a small scale, forming an interlocking set of patterns that nest inside each other like Russian dolls. Approximations of fractal structures have been noticed throughout nature. For example, the overall crystal structure of a snowflake looks remarkably like the structure in a single arm. And the ridges of a mountain range jut into the sky, forming patterns similar to the crags thrusting out from a single peak.

In the same way, the web of large streaks of paint across a whole Pollock painting resembles the finer network covering a small section, Richard Taylor of the University of Oregon in Corvallis reported 8 years ago. He recently used these observations to investigate whether newly discovered paintings are really by Pollock, and hence worth millions of dollars, or whether they're destined for a garage sale. He proposes that the fractal nature of the paintings illuminates what made Pollock a genius rather than a mere slinger of paint.

...........SNIP"

http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20070224/bob9.asp

[sam sarrha]

1. he was a Hard Core Alcoholic.. tragic and sad, ..i think they read too much into it

[Matariki]

2. it might say more about the nature of 'randomness' and fractals

than it does about Pollacks paintings.

[applegrove]

6. Fractals are part of Kaos theory I think. The patterns found in nature

amaze scientists when it should all be so random.

[applegrove]

4. Why are his squiggles so pleasing to the eye and others not so much?

[sam sarrha]

7. guess he was a couple bottles over the line on some..

[applegrove]

8. No - I meant that most of his work is pleasing to the eye..the squiggles

of the woman in the article not so much. He had a connection with something when he painted.

[glitch]

3. Art supposedly precedes physics by about 50 years according to the author

of Art & Physics, Leonard Shlain. It's a good book, interesting theory.

[applegrove]

5. I believe that. I mean what did we learn about art from the impressionists...

that your eye will put together blobs of paint and call it a clear vision and with a resulting clear feeling. Is what we deal with all the time in the "Orwellian" times of today. You have to stop on every news item and think.."is this a true picture" Then stop your feelings and say..do I know where this feeling on politics comes from..am I really sure. Certainly Bush's 30 percent base should be sent to a Monet retrospective immediately. LOL!