{"id":294983,"date":"2025-11-20T07:26:05","date_gmt":"2025-11-20T07:26:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/294983\/"},"modified":"2025-11-20T07:26:05","modified_gmt":"2025-11-20T07:26:05","slug":"study-kids-drip-paintings-more-like-pollocks-than-those-of-adults","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/294983\/","title":{"rendered":"Study: Kids\u2019 drip paintings more like Pollock\u2019s than those of adults"},"content":{"rendered":"

Taylor thought there might be a way to put this new hypothesis to the test, particularly in light of numerous experimental studies showing the prevalence of fractals in human physiology: walking<\/a>, dancing<\/a>, martial arts<\/a>, and balancing motion<\/a>, such as postural sway while standing. \u201cLet\u2019s think about that balance mechanism,\u201d he said. \u201cYou go off-balance, you\u2019re swaying around, so you\u2019ve got big sways mixed in with smaller and smaller and smaller sways. It\u2019s a multi-scale thing.\u201d<\/p>\n

Drip, drip, drip<\/p>\n

Serendipitously, Taylor even had a built-in laboratory environment in which to conduct such experiments: the public \u201cDripfests\u201d he regularly organized, in which both adults and children had the opportunity to create their own Pollock-like artworks by splattering diluted paint on sheets of paper on the floor. Life changes interfered before Taylor could implement the experiment, and the concept got pushed to the back burner. But he revived it a few years ago.<\/p>\n

The study subjects were 18 children between the ages of four and six, and 34 adults ages 18 to 25. The age discrepancy was crucial, since those two groups are at markedly different stages of biomechanical balance development. And this time around, Taylor and his co-authors didn\u2019t just look at the fractal dimensions of the resulting paintings, i.e., measuring the self-similar scaling behavior of the splatter patterns. They also looked at something called \u201clacunarity,\u201d examining the variations in the gaps between paint clusters.<\/p>\n


\n \"Image
\n <\/a><\/p>\n

Image of Pollock\u2019s Number 14, 1948.<\/p>\n

\n Fairbanks et al., 2025\n <\/p>\n

\n Image of Pollock\u2019s Number 14, 1948.<\/p>\n

Fairbanks et al., 2025<\/p>\n


\n \"Image
\n <\/a><\/p>\n

Image of Max Ernst\u2019s Young Man Intrigued by the Flight of a Non-Euclidean Fly.<\/p>\n

\n Fairbanks et al., 2025\n <\/p>\n

\n Image of Max Ernst\u2019s Young Man Intrigued by the Flight of a Non-Euclidean Fly.<\/p>\n

Fairbanks et al., 2025<\/p>\n

\n Image of Pollock\u2019s Number 14, 1948.<\/p>\n

Fairbanks et al., 2025<\/p>\n

\n Image of Max Ernst\u2019s Young Man Intrigued by the Flight of a Non-Euclidean Fly.<\/p>\n

Fairbanks et al., 2025<\/p>\n

The results: Splatter paintings by adults had higher paint densities and wider, more varied paint trajectories. The children\u2019s paintings had smaller fine-scale patterns, more gaps between paint clusters, and simpler one-dimensional trajectories that didn\u2019t change direction nearly as often. \u201cThey both have coarse-scale motions, but the adults have lots of fine-scale structure,\u201d said Taylor. \u201cNot only did the kids have less fine structure, the fine structure they did have was very clumpy, while the adults\u2019 fine structure was very uniform. So when the person is moving and how they regain their balance, we think it\u2019s to do with how much structure there is at these different scales and how uniform it is.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Taylor thought there might be a way to put this new hypothesis to the test, particularly in light…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":294984,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[76,354,355,49,48,356,75],"class_list":{"0":"post-294983","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-arts-and-design","8":"tag-arts","9":"tag-arts-and-design","10":"tag-artsanddesign","11":"tag-ca","12":"tag-canada","13":"tag-design","14":"tag-entertainment"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/294983","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=294983"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/294983\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/294984"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=294983"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=294983"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=294983"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}