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  • The Construction of Jackson Pollock's Fractal Drip Paintings
  • Richard P. Taylor (bio), Adam P. Micolich (bio), and David Jonas (bio)
Abstract

Between 1943 and 1952, Jackson Pollock created patterns by dripping paint onto horizontal canvases. In 1999 the authors identified the patterns as fractal. Ending 50 years of debate over the content of his paintings, the results raised the more general question of how a human being could create fractals. The authors, by analyzing film that recorded the evolution of Pollock's patterns as a function of time, show that the fractals resulted from a systematic construction process involving multiple layers of painted patterns. These results are interpreted within the context of recent visual perception studies of fractal patterns.

Throughout a decade of remarkable artistic development stretching from 1943 to 1952, American painter Jackson Pollock generated a vast body of distinct artwork by rolling large canvases across the floor of his windswept barn and dripping household paint on them from an old can with a wooden stick. In contrast to the broken lines painted by conventional brush contact with the canvas surface, he poured a constant stream of paint onto his horizontal canvases to produce uniquely continuous trajectories [1]. Although this technique initially polarized opinion, in the 50 years since Pollock's last major drip paintings were created, both art historians and the public have come to recognize his patterns as a revolutionary approach to aesthetics. However, it was not until 1999 that we, the present authors, identified the defining visual character of his patterns as fractal [2]—bearing the "fingerprint" of Nature's patterns [3], leading us to label Pollock's work "Fractal Expressionism" [4]. This discovery 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 process of their generation. Pollock's method also offers an intriguing comparison for scientists studying fractal generation in Nature's systems. For psychologists, the process allows an investigation of the fundamental capabilities and limits of human behavior. How did a human being create such intricate patterns with such precision 25 years ahead of their scientific discovery? Most examples of "fractal art" are not painted by an artist but instead are generated indirectly using computer graphics [5]. Pollock received significant media attention at his creative peak in 1950 [6] and the resulting visual documentation of his painting technique offers a unique opportunity to study how fractals can be created directly by a human being. We have analyzed film sequences that recorded the evolution of Pol-lock's patterns during the painting process and have identified a systematic fractal construction process in which a work's fractal quality emerged within the first minute, followed by a period of up to 6 months during which Pollock added multiple layers of paint, thus fine-tuning the fractal content. We investigate here the techniques Pollock employed to refine the fractal content of his paintings over the years and interpret these results within the context of recent visual perception studies of fractal patterns.

Fractal Analysis of the Drip Patterns

During Pollock's peak years, 1947-1952, his drip paintings frequently were described as "organic," suggesting that the imagery in his paintings alluded to Nature. Lacking the cleanliness of artificial order, his dripped paint clearly stands in sharp contrast to the straight lines, triangles, squares and other "man-made" shapes known within mathematics as Euclidean geometry. But if Pollock's swirls of paint are indeed a celebration of Nature's organic shapes, what shapes would these be? Since Pollock's time, two vast areas of study have evolved to accommodate a greater understanding of Nature's rules. During the 1960s, scientists began to examine the dynamics of Nature's processes—how natural systems, such as the weather, evolve with time. They found that, although natural systems masqueraded as being disordered, lurking underneath was a remarkably


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Fig. 1.

A schematic representation of the authors' technique used to detect the fractal quality of Pollock's patterns. The surface of the painting is covered with a computer-generated mesh of identical squares. Then...

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