Jackson Pollock’s famous drip paintings may not be universally appreciated, with some critics arguing that they resemble art created by children. However, a recent study suggests that children’s splatter paintings show a closer resemblance to Pollock’s work than those created by adults when viewed through a fractal lens. This resemblance might be attributed to certain physiological factors like balance, as proposed in a new paper published in Frontiers in Physics.
Co-author Richard Taylor, a physicist from the University of Oregon, identified fractal patterns in Pollock’s seemingly random drip paintings back in 2001. His initial hypothesis sparked debate among art historians and some physicists. In a 2006 paper in Nature, physicists Katherine Jones-Smith and Harsh Mathur from Case University criticized Taylor’s work for being 'seriously flawed' and for not meeting the required range of scales to qualify as fractal. To illustrate the point, Jones-Smith herself created a fractal painting using Taylor’s standards in just five minutes with Photoshop.
Despite the criticisms, particularly concerning the use of fractal analysis as a tool for authenticating Pollock’s originals from replicas or forgeries, Taylor acknowledges the validity of some of these arguments. However, he points to a machine learning-based study from 2015 which achieved a 93 percent accuracy rate in distinguishing genuine Pollocks from non-Pollocks. Taylor leveraged this foundation for his 2024 paper, reporting a 99 percent accuracy in differentiation.
Taylor is not the only researcher to uncover hidden physics within Pollock's art. A 2011 interdisciplinary article in Physics Today explored the 'coiling instability' found in Pollock’s work. This mathematical concept describes how a viscous fluid coils onto itself akin to a coiling rope, similar to pouring cold maple syrup on pancakes. The patterns created are influenced by the viscosity of the fluid and its movement speed. Thick fluids form straight lines when spread quickly but create loops, squiggles, and figure eights if poured slowly.