ART

MORE SCIENCE THAN ART OR MORE ART THAN SCIENCE

or they're really the same

by Julie Chuang

I'm an Artist! I'm an Artist!

Art is the science of what does not yet quite exist, and science is the art of understanding what does exist, or, as we might phrase it, an examination of the material world. Although many people think science and art are at odds, they are not contradictory and in fact are trying to do the same thing. Sometimes science proceeds art and sometimes art proceeds science, but they are always an attempt to describe the world and how the world works. To make a major breakthrough in science requires a lot of creativity, and art is in many ways just another way of producing knowledge.

For the moment, think about the science behind paintings, or, conversely, the science that paintings imagine. For thousands of years, visual art has been used to record the natural world. From pictures of animals in caves to paintings related to experiments hundreds of years ago, the former helped contemporary researchers to clarify the animal groups of the past, while the latter showed the world the processes of past experiments. The work of Da Vinci, Van Gogh, and Dali all embrace this ongoing dance between science and art.

Leonardo da Vinci

Da Vinci is famous for painting the Mona Lisa. And one of the most fascinating aspects of this famous work is how Da Vinci uses the golden section, a mathematical process by which a painter can create the illusion of balance. The nose of the Mona Lisa is a perfect example and is right at the center point of the portrait, making it seem more life-like and active. From a cultural standpoint, the golden section switches from a mathematical principle to a criterion of physical beauty, a way of measuring perfection. It is both science and art.

Unknown Painting from the Renaissance

In the Renaissance era as humanism becomes more and more the norm, the understanding of man himself and the exploration of the universe around him becomes one of the most important, even primary subjects of artists. Da Vinci took a first century theory of architecture -- “practical, sturdy, and beautiful” -- and applied it to the human body. The golden section is mathematical knowledge turned loose in painting. It is the ratio between lines in a circle. From the Renaissance to the 19th century, painters and theorists of painting use Vitruvian's six basic concepts of beauty and proportion. Da Vinci merges the square and circle of the human body and geometry to establish the connection between the painted image, geometry, and numbers. The most important thing is: the center of a person is the navel. If a person opens his arms, the navel is at the center of the circle, passing through the toes and fingers, so that the human body takes on the perfect qualities of a circle.

Measure is the Man of all Things

An early humanist, Coluccio Salutati, wrote: “Anatomy reveals things that nature has always been meticulously hidden.” I don't believe that if someone sees the depths of the human body, someone will not cry. Da Vinci's behavior is not only to paint, but also to narrow the distance between anatomy and art, or to say that it does not exist at all.

Vincent Van Gogh

Starry Night was completed by Van Gogh in a mental hospital. In one of his most famous paintings, he uses exaggerated techniques to vividly depict the movement and change of the night sky. He depicts the sky as high and far away, big and small stars circling the moon. Conversely, the moon forms a huge vortex, and the short lines of the nebula are tangled and hovering, as if people can see the passage of time.

A great painting and a scientific marvel

In terms of painting techniques, Van Gogh used techniques of the early impressionism, instead of simple lines and surfaces to express objects. For instance, end points express the light and shadow of an object, achieving an effect of movement and life that a more realistic approach can’t. At the same time, he pays attention to the use of exaggeration and contrast to add vibrancy to light and shadows. Van Gogh draws the small town in the foreground with short and clear horizontal brushstrokes that form a strong contrast with the curvilinear brushstrokes that dominate the upper part of the screen. The slender spire of the church intersects with the flat line, and the top of the cypress tree happens to pass through the rotating nebula, all of which makes the picture feel as if the night is just flowing by us.

Turbulence is a concept crucial to the mechanics of fluids. We regard the flow of turbulence in the way small and large spirals interact. Large turbulences are continuously generated, as twisted vortices continue to break into opposing turbulent swirls. These smallest swirls disappear under the action of molecular viscous forces, and so on. In nature, we often encounter fluids as turbulence, such as river rapids, air flow, chimney exhaust, etc. Turbulence is every in nature and was once called, "the last mystery of classical physics." It’s a complicated and difficult phenomena and scientists struggled to draw a perfect model of it for centuries. Some people even think that this problem is more difficult than quantum mechanics.

What was he thinking?

What’s amazing is that crazy Van Gogh understood it all. Researchers have digitized Starry Night and then measured the difference in brightness between any two pixels. From the measurement curve of the pixel separation, they found that the patterns in Starry Night are very close to the mathematical model of turbulent flow. Again, sometimes you can’t tell science from art.

Salvador Dali

Surrealism is fascinated by the world of dreams and the subconscious and many people feel that looking at surrealist painting is like falling into a dream. The philosophical impulse behind this connection comes from Sigmund Freud's psychoanalytic theory.

A Big Book for Big Dreams

In 1899, Freud published his full-length study, The Interpretation of Dreams. It sold only 600 copies in its first seven years and then became a huge bestseller and a hugely influential work. Freud believed that human behavior is not only affected by the conscious world, but also by our subconscious desires (the voracious ID). The things that people didn’t pay attention to before — weird dreams where they turn into animals or fight giants — suddenly meant something. And artists were soon to take up the visions of the subconsciousness and dreams. Artists began to try to create on the canvas what was just crazy stuff in the mind. There is no one who reflected this the early 20th century trend more than Salvador Dali.

Dali’s masterpiece is Facial Phantom and Fruit Plate. When we look closely at this painting, we find a great deal of dream imagery. In the upper-right corner, we see waves coming out of a dog’s head that appears to be a mountain. The dog’s right eye (he’s in profile) is actually a tunnel and we can see through to the other side of our canine friend. On the top of his head are clouds that kind of have the quality of dog horns, if dogs had horns, which they don’t.

Deep into the unconsciousness we go

There are three arches under the dog's face, as if it were a city plaza you could stroll through. The piers of the bridge also become the dog's collar. Moving down the painting to the center of it, we find a jug with a woman’s face superimposed over it. Maybe she’s a ghost; it’s impossible to know. Also, her face seems to come right out of the sand of a beach, but it’s a beach with little or no water, just a tiny puddle on the left-hand side. Refocus a bit and you’ll notice the top of the woman's hair looks like a fruit bowl, and also a dog's back. It’s all very strange.

Dali’s painting is realistic in the details of the images, but as a whole image its crazy. What’s clear is that Dali, following Freud, is trying to map our unconscious mind, how we dream and come up with weird and different realities. These images are like those seen in dreams, depicting the haunting and complex ways the mind re-imagines the world we live in while sleeping. These images constantly and persistently force us to face up to the unexpected, intentional, overwhelming, riddle-like phenomena of what we’re really thinking. This painting is just like in a dream. Some things, like ropes and tablecloths, are accidentally and clearly revealed, while other shapes are dim and difficult to distinguish.

Dali's method of contrasting specific images with a dream scape is right out of Freud. After Freud, surrealist painters adopted various techniques, such as automatic technique (Automatism), ready-made objects (Object), collage (Collage), friction (Frottage) and so on to express these strange ideas. But the strangest idea of them all is not what’s on the canvas, but that what we’re really looking at is science and the way science and art are always informing each other.

©Julie Chaung and the CCA Arts Review