Most are familiar with the work of Jackson Pollock, if only from having seen the film about his life starring Ed Harris. Pollock was well known for splattering and throwing paint on canvas, revolutionizing a form of abstract expressionism.
Although many might argue that there was no method to Pollock's madness, others suggest that he used the very laws of physics themselves to create his masterpieces.
Pollock was no physicist, but now real physicists are teaming up to use the laws of fluid dynamics for creating an experimental technique that might uncover how Pollock produced the particular features indicative of his art.
Researchers based this new technique on controlling how paint drippings fall onto a canvas by mimicking Pollock's methods, dripping paint at different speeds and from different heights. Pollock often poured paint directly from the can or dripped it from a variety of tools, including paintbrushes.
Fluid dynamics states that there are two types of fluids: Newtonian and non-Newtonian. A Newtonian fluid's viscosity, or its resistance to flow, does not change even when exposed to stress. Water is an example of Newtonian fluid. A non-Newtonian fluid, though, has varying viscosities, depending on how much stress it receives. Paint falls into this category.
Researchers are using this knowledge and their technique to generate methods with both Newtonian and non-Newtonian fluids. They hope this helps them not only understand Pollock's technique, but the nature of paint, as well.
"One particular property of viscoelastic fluids is that they oppose a large resistance to being stretched," says mechanical engineering professor Roberto Zenit. "Our preliminary results indicate, that, indeed, some of the blobs in the patterns result from this particular property of non-Newtonian fluids, although we still have many more tests to conduct."
Pollock intuitively understood the nature of fluid dynamics. He often mixed paints with solvents to thicken or thin them. He understood that using different speeds and heights affected how the paint appeared on the canvas.
"When Pollock was doing that, when he mixed his paints and diluted them and chose paints of similar density and different viscosity and so on, in a way he was doing experiments in fluid dynamics," says Andrzej Herczynski, an author on a paper about Pollock's use of physics. "What's interesting here is that he set out, in this painting in particular [Untitled 1948-49], to explore that effect before physicists were exploring it."
Researchers hope to apply their technique for analyzing other artists' work, as well. Future projects include studying fluid dynamics in brush strokes, as well as understanding features in paintings done in water color.
[Photo Credit: Jonathon Rosenthal/Flickr]
