Jackson Pollocks Fractals

Georgie Greenwood, Jakub Polk, Liam Turner, Siobhan Weekes

Introduction

Why Might We See Fractals?

Measuring Pollocks Fractals

In 1999, Richard Taylor made a bold

claim: that the drip paintings created by the
late, great Jackson Pollock contained fractal patterns so unique, that they could be
employed when testing paintings for authenticity.

Pollocks chaotic movement around the

canvas appeared to imitate the chaos found
in nature, leading to similar types of patterns
being generated. In the same way that one
branch on a tree may have the same structure of the tree as a whole, some of Pollocks
paintings also displayed these fractal properties.

In order to measure the fractal dimension

(called DS ) of Pollocks paintings, the box
counting method was used. This method
works by covering the painting with a grid
of identically sized squares and the number
of these squares which contain part of the
painted pattern is counted, denoted N (L).
The length of these squares is reduced systematically with the process repeated to find
N (L) for various lengths, L.
The largest size L is taken at the size
of the canvas, with the smallest at the size
of the finest paintwork in the picture, approximately 1mm. Fractal behaviour is observed when N (L) LD , where D is the
box counting dimension and 1 < D < 2,
since the paintings are in two dimensions.
These values of D are found by plotting a
graph of logN (L) against logL and taking
the gradient of the resulting graph.

Pollocks Technique
To explain why fractals may be present
in Pollocks work, it would first be helpful to
understand how the paintings were created.
Pollock was nicknamed Jack the Dripper
in 1956 by Time magazine due to his use of a
drip painting technique, which he employed
while standing over a large canvas, usually
several feet in both length and width, placed
flat on the ground. By constantly moving
around the canvas with a near-continuous
stream of paint pouring onto it, Pollock appeared to be following Lvy flight.

Lvy Flight
Lvy flight can be defined as a sequence of steps, each made in isotropic
random directions (meaning that they
follow a uniform distribution), with each
step having a random length. Examples
of Lvy flight include the way animals
forage when food is scarce. Lvy flight
is heavily related to chaos theory, a relationship also shared by fractals.

Figure 1: Blue Poles (original title: Number 11, 1952)

by Jackson Pollock. (Source: national gallery of australia)

Taylor also argued that the lasting appeal behind Pollocks paintings was due to
fractal patterns, which people may naturally
find aesthetically pleasing. After conducting a series of polls, Taylor concluded that
people seem to prefer artwork with fractal
dimensions similar to those found in nature.
If Pollocks artwork did contain examples of truly complex fractals as Taylor suggested, then further exploration could yield
an answer to the question of how to distinguish forgeries from the real thing - a
vital technique for the art community.

Credibility of Fractal
Analysis
Doubt about how viable fractals could be
when testing Pollock paintings grew when
Katherine Jones-Smith and Harsh Mathur
proved that the fractal-like behaviour can
be easily recreated, even by drawing freehand. Jones-Smith found that simple drawings, such as the one in Figure 2, exhibited
the same fractal behaviour that Pollocks work did. Not only that, but testing
some of Pollocks other paintings using fractal analysis also gave different results, which
would imply that artwork known to be genuine were in fact forgeries.

Bibliography
[1] R. P. Taylor, A. P. Micolich, D. Jonas, Nature
399, 422, 1999,
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/
v444/n7119/full/nature05398.html.
[2] J. Ouellette, Discover Magazine, 1st November
2001, http://discovermagazine.com/2001/
nov/featpollock.
[3] R. P. Taylor, A. P. Micolich, D. Jonas, Physics
World Volume 12, October 1999,
https://plus.maths.org/content/
fractal-expressionism.
(All accessed November 29th.)

Figure 2: Untitled 5, the freehand drawing created by

Jones-Smith to counter Taylors argument. (Source:
The New York Times)