Today I found this interesting video that provided me with a little food for thought, so I decided to delve a little deeper into the theories behind it.
According to José Luis Aragón of the National Autonomous University in Mexico during Van Gogh's most psychotic episodes he accurately painted the patterns of turbulence in his painting Starry Night, which was painted during his time in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence Asylum.[1] He used luminescence in the piece, generating a sense of motion. It was a popular technique among impressionists of the time, such as Munch and Monet.
It was found that Van Gogh suffered from a mental epilepsy, Naith and Smith wrote "Not the kind, known since antiquity, that caused the limbs to jerk and the body to collapse ('the falling sickness', as it was sometimes called), but a mental epilepsy—a seizing up of the mind: a collapse of thought, perception, reason, and emotion that manifested itself entirely in the brain and often prompted bizarre, dramatic behavior." The symptoms of the seizures "resembled fireworks of electrical impulses in the brain."[2] And interestingly in his letters to his brother Theo, he compared the stars to dots on a map and mused that, as one takes a train to travel on earth, "we take death to reach a star."[3] Gogh is at one with nature in many of his works, which if he successfully depicted the pattern of turbulence, would make sense, with his mental illness he accessed new parts of his mind, normally ones we don't get to use.
References
1. http://arxiv.org/abs/physics/0606246
2. http://stevennaifeh.com/van-gogh-the-life/
3. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Starry_Night
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Whilst looking around for answers I came across some of the other mathematical concepts that could be used in artistic work. As I found impressionists only started experimenting with complementary colours from scientific discoveries of them in the 19th century. I thought having a look might bring something new and fresh to my work, I especially want to start creating digital patterns with my traditional work.
Fractals
Graphs
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