Welcome to your Tuesday open thread. Many of you, if you’re like me, are nursing your post-holiday food comas. Good holiday though, right?
This story will make you smile. I promise. Just click on the link.
Yes, science is cool. Physicists have studied Jackson Pollock’s paintings and found something interesting.
But first, the newest scientific take on Pollock: Physics Today recently described research by Harvard physicist L. Mahadevan and colleagues who used fluid physics to study Pollock’s style. The researchers wanted to understand how Pollock employed gravity and paint of varying viscosities to make coils, splashes and spots on the canvas.
Among other things, Mahadevan’s team “demonstrated mathematically that the only way Pollock could create such tiny looping, meandering oscillations was to hold his brush or trowel high up off the canvas and let out a flow of paint that narrowed and sped up as it fell. To create tiny loops rather than waves, he likely moved his hand slowly, allowing physics to coauthor his art.”
What’s interesting to me is that the fluid physics used to study Pollock’s art was only developed after Pollock was already finished making his masterpieces. Pollock started doing his trademark paintings in the 1940s. Physicists started working out fluid dynamics in the 1950s and 60s. In other words, Pollock’s use of fluid dynamics to make art predates the ability of physicists to mathematically model the same processes.
Science and art go together well. Museums now employ chemists to determine pigments to help restore paintings. Scientists also use imaging to see behind the paint, and can see how paintings have changed and if there’s another masterpiece behind the paint.