Personal reflections on Jackson Pollock's fractal paintings

Abstract

The art world changed forever when Jackson Pollock picked up a can and poured paint onto a vast canvas rolled across the floor of his windswept barn. Fifty years on, art theorists recognize his patterns as being a revolutionary approach to aesthetics. A significant step forward in understanding Pollock's aesthetics occurred in 1999 when my scientific analysis showed that his paintings are fractal. Fractals consist of patterns that recur at finer and finer magnifications, building up shapes of immense complexity. Significantly, many natural patterns (for example, lightning, clouds, mountains, and trees) are also fractal. In this essay, I will present some personal reflections on this relationship between the fractal patterns of Pollock and those of nature, and also on the interactions between art and science as the project evolved.

A New Mathematical Method for Pattern Development

“…Lots of people tried to imitate his creations but no one has been able to return the charm of Pollock's works. For a long time, nobody knew what made Pollock's pictures so appealing, until Richard Taylor [11], a painter and physicist, discovered in those the self-similar forms [11,12]. These shapes were named fractals by Benoît Mandelbrot [13], who derived this name from the Latin word "fractus", which means "broken".…”

“…The fractals, belonging to the concept set of chaos theory, are patterns that are repeated within themselves at lower organizational levels [11]. Fig.…”