Study: Kids’ drip paintings more like Pollock’s than those of adults

Not everyone appreciates the artistry of Jackson Pollock’s famous drip paintings, with some dismissing them as something any child could create. While Pollock’s work is undeniably more sophisticated than that, it turns out that when one looks at splatter paintings made by adults and young children through a fractal lens and compares them to those of Pollock himself, the children’s work does bear a closer resemblance to Pollock’s than those of the adults. This might be due to the artist’s physiology, namely a certain clumsiness with regard to balance, according to a new paper published in the journal Frontiers in Physics.

Co-author Richard Taylor, a physicist at the University of Oregon, first found evidence of fractal patterns in Pollock’s seemingly random drip patterns in 2001. As previously reported, his original hypothesis drew considerable controversy, both from art historians and a few fellow physicists. In ...