In 1999, Richard “Drippy” Taylor at the Univesity of New South Wales in Australia announced that he was able to tell a painting by the American abstract expresisonist Jackson Pollock by analysing the fractal patterns made by the paint on the canvas. He claimed that the fractal signature Pollock made as he dripped paint onto the canvas was unique and the technique could be used to a tell the real thing from a forgery.

The technique was little more than a novelty until 2003 when a cache of more than 25 unattributed paintings believed to be by Pollock were found in the US. All of a sudden the fractal analysis technique meant the difference between a worthless piece o’ cancas and a million dollar masterpiece.

Or so Taylor thought. Now Lawrence “Beam me up Scotty” Krauss and colleagues from Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland say they taken another look at the fractal technique and have pronounced it a load of old pollocks.

The team say they have shown that “amateur artists seeking to emulate Pollock’s technique can successfully create paintings which possess the fractal signature said to be unique to Pollock”. They also say that “even authentic Pollock paintings fail to possess his fractal signature”.

So there ya have it. The ball’s now firmly in Drippy Taylor’s court.

Ref: arxiv.org/abs/0710.4917: Drip Paintings and Fractal Analysis

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