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, dancing, martial arts, and balancing motion, such as postural sway while standing. “Let’s think about that balance mechanism,” he said. “You go off-balance, you’re swaying around, so you’ve got big sways mixed in with smaller and smaller and smaller sways. It’s a multi-scale thing.”
Drip, drip, drip
Serendipitously, Taylor even had a built-in laboratory environment in which to conduct such experiments: the public “Dripfests” 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.
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’t 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 “lacunarity,” examining the variations in the gaps between paint clusters.
Image of Pollock’s Number 14, 1948.
Fairbanks et al., 2025
Image of Pollock’s Number 14, 1948.
Fairbanks et al., 2025
Image of Max Ernst’s Young Man Intrigued by the Flight of a Non-Euclidean Fly.
Fairbanks et al., 2025
Image of Max Ernst’s Young Man Intrigued by the Flight of a Non-Euclidean Fly.
Fairbanks et al., 2025
Image of Pollock’s Number 14, 1948.
Fairbanks et al., 2025
Image of Max Ernst’s Young Man Intrigued by the Flight of a Non-Euclidean Fly.
Fairbanks et al., 2025
The results: Splatter paintings by adults had higher paint densities and wider, more varied paint trajectories. The children’s paintings had smaller fine-scale patterns, more gaps between paint clusters, and simpler one-dimensional trajectories that didn’t change direction nearly as often. “They both have coarse-scale motions, but the adults have lots of fine-scale structure,” said Taylor. “Not only did the kids have less fine structure, the fine structure they did have was very clumpy, while the adults’ fine structure was very uniform. So when the person is moving and how they regain their balance, we think it’s to do with how much structure there is at these different scales and how uniform it is.”
