Pollock avoided hydrodynamic instabilities to paint with his dripping technique

Abstract

Jackson Pollock's most celebrated abstract paintings were produced with the so-called dripping technique. By pouring liquid paint with the help of a stick or from a can, Pollock deposited viscous fluid filaments on a horizontal canvas, rhythmically moving around it. The intricate webs of lines, ubiquitous in his compositions, have fascinated art historians and scientists. Based on image analysis of historical video recordings, we experimentally reproduced the painting process. We conclude that Pollock avoided the appearance of the hydrodynamic instabilities, contrary to what was argued by previous studies. Pollock selected the physical properties of the paint to prevent filament fragmentation before deposition, and applied it while moving his hand sufficiently fast and at certain heights to avoid fluid filaments from coiling into themselves. An understanding of the physical conditions at which these patterns were created is important to further art research and it can be used as a tool in the authentication of paintings.

Fig 1. Schematic view of a small portion (lower right) of ‘Number 14: Gray’, by Jackson Pollock (1948).

The image size is approximately 30×20 cm². It shows only lines. The original painting can be seen in [9].

Fig 2. Illustration of Pollock’s painting action.

(A) Side view of Pollock painting, while moving around the canvas. The two quantities measured from the videos, U_hand and H, are shown; (B) Pollock painting over a transparent glass sheet. The drawings are schematic reproductions of Hans Namuth’s documentary [21].

Fig 3. Schematic view of the experimental setup.

Fig 4

(A) Stick flow rate, Q_stick, as a function of loading speed, U_load, for three different sticks and two fluids; the black dashed line shows a trend of $Q_{stick}\sim U_{load}^{1/4}$, while the blue dashed-dotted line shows the trend $Q_{stick}\sim U_{load}^{3/2}$. (B) Ratio $Q_{stick}/\left(D_{stick}^2{\nu }^{1/4}\right)$ as a function of loading speed, U_load; the prediction of Eq 11 is shown by the dashed-dotted line.

Fig 5. Statistics of Pollock’s painting action.

(A) Histogram of the hand speed, U_hand; (B) histogram of the height of the hand from the surface of the canvas, H; histogram of the loading speed, U_load. The histograms are normalized such that the integral over the frequencies is unity. The vertical solid lines show the mean values in each case $\overline{x}$x. The vertical dashed lines to the right and left of $\overline{x}$ represent $\overline{x}+{\sigma }_x$ and $\overline{x}-{\sigma }_x$, respectively, where σ_x is the standard deviation.

Fig 6. Map of the ratio U*/Q*, as function of normalized height, H*.

The empty and filled symbols correspond to straight and curled traces, respectively. Each symbol represents experiments for different fluids, see Table 1. The black asterisk shows ($H_{Pollock}^{*},{(U^{*}/\sqrt{Q^{*}})}_{Pollock})$, considering the measurements shown in Fig 5, the physical properties of black paint B1 (from Table 1) and the calculation of $Q_{stick}^{*}$ (from Eq 11). The solid-line rectangle shows a region considering one standard deviation (plus and minus) around mean values of height and speed. The dashed and dashed-dotted rectangles show the regions that correspond to fluids with twice and half the value of the viscosity of fluid B1, respectively. The thick dashed line shows the prediction from Eq 19.