Slashdot Mirror
Van Gogh Painted Turbulence
rangeva writes "Nature is reporting that Van Gogh works have a pattern of light and dark that closely follows the mathematical structure of turbulent flow. From the article: 'Vincent van Gogh is known for his chaotic paintings and similarly tumultuous state of mind. Now a mathematical analysis of his works reveals that the stormy patterns in many of his paintings are uncannily like real turbulence, as seen in swirling water or the air from a jet engine.'"
Just proves his head was full of air and that he had a single neuron, precisely located on it's center. When he cut one of his ear, he created a stream of air, coming from the interior of his head (high pressure) to the outside (low pressure). The single neuron, placed in the middle of the stream, obviously caused some turbulence, explaining why he "painted turbulence".
Eventhough studies like these can be interresting...
I like van Gogh, the article is somewhat interresting, but I enjoy the paintings without the mathematical analysis better.
Absolutely amazing. I mean, what are the chances that he ever saw turbulent streams or windswept clouds living in rural Europe or that he took his inpiration from those pattern as much as from all the other organic/natural patterns he used everywhere in his art?
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
Why would he have to intuit chaotic flow? Anyone who's seen smoke rise from a cigarette or viciously stirred an absinthe and water mix, has seen similarly chaotic swirls. I think its safe to say Vincent would have done both.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
It's quite sad to see such a humorous post being modded down.
In Soviet Russia, turbulence paints you!
Agreed. I was going to come up with something pithy about him watching smoke roll past his disfigured head and painting the swirls he saw, but the OP here has my half-baked post beat all to hell.
Skivvy Niner? Email me!
HEY! Look left just ONE MORE TIME!
Here's a shocker: Van Gogh saw leaves blowing in the wind, the wind patterns on the surface of the water, and a myriad of other things that are visual cues to what turbulence looks like. Combine all those together with his incredible painting talent, and surprise! He manages to paint something like what the air was actually doing. Oh, and he may have actually seen some colors in the air through sensory blending (drugs plus being a bit crazy).
stuff |
Somewhat interesting but not nearly as interesting as the theory that an eye problem or digitalis poisoning was the main cause of his use of color and the halo's he painted around light sources. See -> http://www.psych.ucalgary.ca/pace/va-lab/AVDE-Webs ite/VanGogh.html
Turbulance has resonence.
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
Amateur - I code turbulence!
The article goes on about turbulence as if you can only draw these patterns if you know the maths and laws behind it. That's a bit like saying you can't catch a ball tossed to you if you don't know Newton's laws.
-- Cheers!
Only if it was, y'know... funny. ;-)
Everything in moderation, including moderation itself
Blame the developers.
Turbulence is derived from the Latin turbinis which means vortex. The same name also gave way to turbine - a phrase first used by Claude Burdin to describe the aforementioned device in 1828.
Van Gogh lived from 1853 until 1890, so man-made turbines existed during his lifetime, as well as the more natural effects he will have seen that others have mentioned.
Ergo, the entire point of the article is moot, he painted what he saw and understood, that - believe it or not - is what artists do. Why people have to waste their time trying to comprehend why Van Gogh painted turbulence is beyond me...
Pardon how sarcastic this is going to sound--I promise that's not how I mean it: You're right, this is pretty interesting. I was so interested that I tried to look up Kolmogorov scaling in, among other places, the wikipedia. The closest thing I could find was Kolmogorov Microscales which is not very helpful, since a painting cannot 'exhibit' units of measure proper. If you know anything about the phenomenon of this 'scaling' I'd love to hear more about it, especially as I'm a big 'Gogh fan.
This reminds me of all of those English classes in high school where the teachers would tell us all of these subtle things that were represented in writers works. I would always wonder if the authors would laugh themselves silly over all of it.
Why does all of this mean Van Gogh new that he was painting turbulence? Why can this not just be a byproduct of the way that he holds the brush and moves the brush on the canvas?
I bet that somewhere out there is a cave drawing where the patterns on the rock are a perfect representation of something in Quantumm Physics. When we find that is it proof that cave men understood Quantum Physics?
People, by their very nature, cannot truly produce randomness. Everything we output is laden with the associations and processes inherent in the brain. Jackson Pollack apparently painted with a certain fractal regularity that he wasn't conscious of. I imagine that Van Gough didn't intend to depict turbulence per se, he just painted that way, and others percieve the mechanics.
You can see turbulent phenomena. You can feel that representations of such phenomena are correct or incorrect. But that's not the same as seeing turbulence.
Seeing turbulence itself takes more than having the image of a turbulent phenomenon on your retina. That takes place at a higher level of the brain, one that is more imaginative. Artists don't "see" in the way a camera sees. not even photographers, who must search for the right opportunity where what they are looking for can be stripped naked of irrelevant detail.
Painters especially don't just record what they see. They abstract salient details and present them in ways that emphasize or deemphasize. Even the most routine of painters will move a tree in a landscape or improve on a train of clouds in order to produce a more pleasing rhtyhm. But what we are talking about here goes way beyond that.
Naturally, any realistic depiction of landscape will reproduce mathematical relationships, such as the fractal geometry of waves. But only a master like Hokusai can make a wave whose fractal nature is burned into our memory.
Works such as "The Great Wave Off Kanagawa" by Hokusai, or "Starry Night" by Van Goh are not realistic, they are hyper-real. It takes a great drafting skill to paint what is there, yet while it is a talent, it is not genius. Go out and look at some waves or some swirling smoke then try to think how difficult it is to freeze such a moving, evolving phenomenon and boil it down to its perceptual essence. That take genius.
The reason art is valuable to the human race is that it show us how to be aware of what is latent in our perception, but does not enter into our consciousness.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Seems this trait is shared among other artists. When researchers had random people try to duplicate Jackson Pollock's drip-style paintings which were then rated against actual Pollocks in a double-blind experiment, people vastly preferred the authentic Pollocks. Seems that there is a fractal based component to Pollock's style that is not easily replicable. Perhaps most or all great artists have a mathematical aspect to their work that is subconciously pleasing to the mind.
Funny thing about language, it's not static and set in stone. It's an living evolving thing. New words are developed, old words take on new meanings, or die out. Get used to it.
In games, I have "strafed" in both senses. It all depends on the context in which the word is used.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
People who never had any training in music can somehow play music, people who never studied math but have a high mathmatical aptitude, or even people who have plenty of indicators for Aspergers (sp?) syndrome who otherwise are capable programmers and entrepeneurs (Bill Gates, anyone?). Of course, the "idiot" is in quotations because two out of three ain't bad.
Just because you can mod me down, doesn't mean you're right. Shoes for industry!
This article reminds me of a similar study done on Jackson Pollock's drip paintings, which exhibit the characteristics of fractals. Pollock painted in the '50s, before fractal geometry was developed. Works by other artists, who imitated Pollock's technique, do not have the same qualities. Both Van Gogh and Pollock seem to have been able to perceive the mathematical underpinnings of the natural world in an intuitive way, and could communicate that perception through their art.
Some more info (PDF warning).
Soylent Green is peoplicious!
Two observations.
1. Van Gogh may have simply had about -4.50 myopia and was painting realism...
2. The Starry Night painting at the MoMA in NYC looks like crap... small, unfinished at the edges, and not
breathtaking like certain other Van Gogh paintings I've seen. The posters are better than the original.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
.. the turbulence of the matter inside his aqueus humour as he looked from spot to spot?
Van Gogh's ability to properly depict (even closely) one of Nature's most chaotic of events only implies that somehow, his brain was able to calculate his efforts. Without getting into pseudo-science, crystals and all that biz; it is rather obvious that those who extend deep into the extremes of various mental illnesses or retardations display extrodinary abilities, such as high level autism.
Without any psychology or neuroscience, I speculate that perhaps such abilities are so taxing that their brains aren't able to function with common tasks, or their taxing abilities require such a unique percpective extreme rendering them unacceptable to the average person. The latter isn't too far-fetched; as some of the greatest poetry, music, visual arts and philosophical insights have been visioned from deep within the altered reality of euphoria/inebriation.
There are a lot of things, how the brain calculates everything involved in pouring a glass of water. Or, even more fascinating, how you can immediately calculate and compensate for varying viscosities in fluids within a cup after first grabbing it; such as rubbing alcohol, or honey, to adjust how you handle the cup to prevent excessive spilling of the fluids... face recognition, voice recognition, 'perfect pitch', et al. Some of these tasks, we can create a machine to do... very inefficiently and most are haphazard at best.
Is there a science or 'ology' that attempts to crack Nature's algorithms; which must be the most simplistic implementations that occur within the brains of any living organism? Even a flea's brain calculates tons of calculus, even if nothing more than trajectory, range and how much force to use to get to a secondary position. It's brain is a bit small; yet, so much is hidden. Is there even a starting point? Is there any sensors and analytical equipment so precise to detect the chemical reactions and associate them to mathematical representations?
Because I've done loads of acid, mushrooms, and other hallucinogens, and his paintings are *perfect* reproductions of the way your field of vision breaks down into small swirling regions when you get really intense visuals. He was painting the trippy visuals that he was seeing in front of his eyes, and it's one of the best portayals that I've ever seen.
All other theories are moot when you've seen exactly what he saw. It's completely unmistakable, you'd recognize it in an instant if you'd seen it yourself.
Armed with a basic knowledge of quantum mechanics you can start solving problems using little more than basic linear algebra or the theory of partial differential equations. You can start computing energy levels for simple atoms, or estimate tunneling probabilities, or derive some qualitative features of the conduction of current through crystalline materials.
Turbulent flow, on the other hand, is incredibly difficult. The usual mathematical tools (such as the theory of partial differential equations mentioned above) fail in all sorts of ways. The dynamics are nonlinear and highly sensitive to initial conditions. It's hard to derive statistical properties of the chaotic regions of the dynamics. We often have to fall back on empirically derived rules. Even in a perfect fluid that exactly satisfies the Navier-Stokes equations it is hard to make long term predictions - which is why one of the Millennium Prize problems is about these equations.
Harder than quantum mechanics? That really isn't saying much.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.