Jackson Pollock
Jackson Pollock's drip paintings were an important step in the
development of modern art, and have been the subject of many analyses in art criticism.
Recently, Taylor, Micolich, and Jonas
applied the method of box-counting dimensions to look for quantitative differences
between these paintings. To study the
box-counting dimension of the
paintings,
they digitized the painting being studied, covered it with a grid of squares
of size r, and counted the number N(r) of grid squares that contained part of the
drip pattern. Plotting log(N(r)) vs log(1/r), they observed the points fall not along
a single straight line, but rather along a broken line. One straight section of the
broken line corresponds to r in the range 1mm < r < 5cm, the other straight section to
5cm < r < 2.5 m. The lower range is determined by how the paint drips onto the
canvas, the upper range by how Pollock moved across the canvas. Early drip paintings done in
1943 had upper range slopes (the box-counting dimension of the pattern) close to 1.
By 1952, this slope had increased to about
1.7. The increase in dimension appears to correlate well with the evolution of Pollock's
paint dripping technique.
