Turbulent luminance in impassioned van Gogh paintings

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 van Gogh paintings, painted at times close to periods of prolonged psychotic agitation of this artist, compares notable well with the PDF of the velocity differences in a turbulent flow as predicted by the statistical theory of Kolmogorov. This is not the first time that this analogy with hydrodinamic turbulence is reported in a field far different from fluid mechanics; it has been also observed in fluctuations of the foreign exchange markets time series [2].