Chaos, Turbulence, Art, Van Gogh, Schizophrenia, and You
Catching up on my backlog of NewScientist issues from the summer, I read an article about an analysis of Van Gogh's art that discovered the emotional chaos represented so masterfully in some of his work may be due to the same principles involved in physical turbulence. I don't understand the specifics of the turbulence theory involved (see the extended entry for the full article) but the researchers found variations in Van Gogh's art that corresponded to his mental states. When he was calmer, the turbulence disappears but is prevalent in art painted during his times of mental instability.
This was all the more relevant to me as I had just followed a Digg story linking to a series of photos purportedly showing Louis Wains' decent into schizophrenia. It's interesting and a bit scary even. I also ran across a BoingBoing story on the same photos that had additional comments suggesting that the linear progression indicated in the series of photos isn't a reliable as it is often portrayed. I guess that many of the pictures were arranged afterwards in a way that "shows" the progression of the diseases, when in fact it is just as plausible that the artist was experimenting with different styles of art as his career progressed.
Perhaps the researchers who analyzed Van Gogh's work could be brought in on this.
I think it also is plausible that this kind of underlying order in chaos could be implemented mechanically to help build artistic robots. We'll see.
All in all, it's cool research that further illuminates the way that our brains are responsible for making order out of the environment as well as contributing the environment that impacts us. Van Gogh's brain helped him create chaos and viewing that chaos makes us feel it, emotionally. It's all a big feedback loop between environment, culture, and cognition.
Van Gogh had turbulence down to a fine art
15 July 2006
From New Scientist Print Edition. Subscribe and get 4 free issues.
Mark Buchanan
ART experts have long marvelled at the emotional chaos apparent in the later paintings of the Dutch artist Vincent Van Gogh. Perhaps that is because the images reflect light in a way that mimics the physics of turbulence.
At least that's the view of a team of physicists led by Jose Luis Aragon of the National Autonomous University of Mexico, who analysed several of Van Gogh's later paintings, including Starry Night, Road with Cypress and Star (see below) and Wheat Field with Crows.
Mathematically, they studied how the luminosity, which is a measure of the total amount of visible light reflected off the paintings, varied across the canvas. Specifically, they analysed the likelihood that two points a distance D apart would have the same, or similar, brightness. In each of the paintings, they found that points further apart were statistically less likely to have similar luminosities.
This in itself is not surprising. But this probability decreased in a very simple way, in proportion to the distance between the points, D, raised to some power.
This pattern is significant. The very same pattern characterises variations in fluid velocity at different points in a churning, turbulent liquid, a property called Kolmogorov scaling, after the Russian physicist Andrei Kolmogorov. "Some art critics have said that Van Gogh's paintings give the impression of looking through a turbulent atmosphere," says team member Gerardo Naumis. "But we were very, very surprised by the close link to Kolmogorov's theory."
Also surprising is the difference between Van Gogh's later and earlier work. The pattern of luminosity in the paintings Van Gogh created during periods of emotional calm bears little resemblance to real-world turbulence. A strong visual sense of turbulence, apparent also in the mathematical analysis, appeared only in paintings created during times when he was psychologically disturbed. Van Gogh painted his famous Starry Night, for example, during a year spent in an asylum. In contrast, he completed his Self-Portrait with Pipe and Bandaged Ear in a state of self-described "absolute calm". Mathematically, this work lacks the signature of turbulence (www.arxiv.org/physics/0606246).
Naumis speculates that there could be some link between fluid turbulence and the dynamics of neural processes in disturbed individuals, and that mathematics might provide a means for detecting psychic disturbance through the analysis of drawings. "The work so far is only a first step," he says. "We need to apply it to patients and see if it works."
From issue 2560 of New Scientist magazine, 15 July 2006, page 17