Narrow Results

The construction of an abstract expressionist artwork is driven by chaotic mechanisms that sculpt multifractal characteristics. Jackson Pollock’s paintings, for example, arise due to the random process of depositing drops and jets of paint on a canvas. However, most of the paintings and drawings try to recreate with fidelity common forms, natural landscapes, and the human figure. Accordingly, in the context of the formation of statistically self-similar objects, a question persists: will it be possible to find some vestige of multifractal structure in drawings or paintings whose elaboration process tries to avoid chaos? In this work, we scrutinize into several artistic drawings in sand to answer this intriguing question. These pieces of art are elaborated using craters, furrows, and sand piles; and some of them are inscribed on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. We prove that the sand drawings analyzed here are multifractal objects. This finding suggests that a piece of visual art, which may initially appear ordered, contains many components distributed at different degrees of self-similarity that substantially increase the structural complexity.

Art and science have a common root. In spite of occasional misunderstandings between the sciences and the humanities representing different academic disciplines, a bridge between art and science can be built to allow broader perspectives in understanding and foster new creativities both for artists and scientists. We provide examples from the visual arts, music, and poetry. In particular, the spatial configuration in pictures or the temporal structure in music and poetry are addressed. They directly represent a conceptual link between artistic appreciation and mechanisms of information processing in the brain.

The eminent Chinese artist LaoZhu has created a homogeneous set of abstract pictures that are referred to as the “third abstraction.” By definition, these pictures are meant to be representations of the artist’s personal involvement and as such to create an internal point of view in the observer on an implicit level of processing. Aiming at investigating whether the artist’s choice of a specific color is experienced in a specific way by the recipient, we assessed both explicit and implicit (i.e., neuro-cognitive) correlates in naive viewers of LaoZhu’s pieces. The behavioral results reveal a preference of the original red paintings over color-changed counterparts in green or black. Paradoxically and inconsistent with predictions, we found higher levels of neural activation in several brain regions (predominantly in the frontal and parietal cortices) for the color-changed compared to the original red conditions. These observations add empirically to the complementarity of early visual pathways and higher-order cognition as well as of explicit and implicit information processing during aesthetic appreciation. We discuss our findings in light of processing effort and top-down control of the color-changed paintings. With regard to the third abstraction as defined by LaoZhu, in particular to the distinction between an external and internal point of view when viewing abstract art, our results contribute to an understanding of “abstraction and empathy” as a fundamental part of aesthetic appreciation.