Turbulent luminance in impassioned van Gogh paintings
J.L. Arag\'on, Gerardo G. Naumis, M. Bai, M. Torres, P.K. Maini

TL;DR
This paper demonstrates that luminance fluctuations in Van Gogh's late paintings resemble turbulent flow statistics, linking artistic turbulence with fluid dynamics and psychotic agitation periods.
Contribution
It introduces a novel analogy between luminance fluctuations in Van Gogh's paintings and turbulence theory, especially Kolmogorov's predictions, based on psychotic agitation periods.
Findings
Luminance fluctuation PDFs match turbulence velocity difference PDFs.
Paintings from periods of agitation show stronger turbulence-like patterns.
The turbulence analogy extends to financial market fluctuations.
Abstract
Everything in the last period of Vincent van Gogh paintings seems to be moving; this dynamical style served to transmit his own feelings about a figure or a landscape. Since the early impressionism, artists emprically discovered that an adequate use of luminance could generate the sensation of motion. This sentation was more complex in the case of van Gogh paintings of the last period: turbulence is the main adjective used to describe these paintings. It has been specifically mentioned, for instance, that the famous painting \emph{Starry Night}, vividly transmits the sense of turbulence and was compared with a picture of a distant star from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, where eddies probably caused by dust and gas turbulence are clearly seen [1]. It is the purpose of this paper to show that the probability distribution function (PDF) of luminance fluctuations in some impassioned…
Peer Reviews
No public reviews on file for this paper yet. If you reviewed it on a platform where reviews are public (OpenReview, ICLR, NeurIPS, ICML), you can paste yours below so the community can read it here.
Videos
No videos yet. Explain this paper in a talk, walkthrough, or lecture? Add one.
Taxonomy
TopicsAesthetic Perception and Analysis · Complex Systems and Time Series Analysis
