Researchers have discovered that the brushstrokes in Van Gogh’s iconic painting ‘The Starry Night’ align with the principles of fluid dynamics and turbulence, shedding light on the artist’s innate understanding of the natural world.
Revealing the Turbulence
The swirling night sky in Van Gogh’s ‘The Starry Night’ has captured delights for centuries. However scientists have re-evaluated the piece and learned that there has actually been a hidden mystery in the brushstrokes themselves.
Researchers in marine sciences and fluid dynamics have, through advanced analysis methods, found evidence of turbulence in Van Gogh’s Starry Night. The researchers then identified areas of the scale (small-large), shape and relative intensity of paint strokes in which alignments were found between their data and the existing theory of atmospheric movement and energy transfers.
The researchers found that the overall distribution of 14 main vortices in the painting fits with Kolmogorov’s law, which describes how energy is transferred from large-scale to small-scale turbulent flows in the atmosphere. Going further, they showed that the diffusion of relative brightness is consistent with Batchelor scaling, a well known theory for energy laws in small scale passive scalar turbulence.
The alignment with both large-scale and small-scale forces — this double-whammy connection to turbulence theory — is an unusual one, leading Potocky to think that Van Gogh had a unique ability to groove on the world around him, even if he wasn’t doing so in scientific language.
An Intuitive Grasp of Nature
But how did Van Gogh get the physics of the sky so right in his painting? Some of it presumably comes from good observation of nature: live in the world, says Dan Janzen.
“Van Gogh may have learned how to accurately depict such turbulence from observing the movement of clouds and the atmosphere, or his observation could be scientific like Reynolds’, which demonstrated an internal sense for probing the dynamism in nature,” says co-author Yongxiang Huang.
Van Gogh had a lifelong practice of carefully observing the natural world, sitting for hours painting fields and rivers in changing light or investigating weather patterns. This meticulous skill could’ve possibly given him an intuitive knowledge of the physics involved.
But the researchers also catch on that Van Gogh may have had artistic talents beyond accurate vision. The way he managed to translate the complexity of the atmosphere onto the canvas, with his bold handling and bright palette are indicative that he had an inherently profound feeling for how fluid dynamics and turbulence work.
Vincent van Gogh ‘The Starry Night’, in a way, is proof of his spiritual connection to the universe that allowed him to portray so well the rhythm and dynamics of movement and energy inherent in nature.
Conclusion
The linkage of ‘air movements’ with the turbulence behaviour appearing in both the ‘museum classic picture’ The Starry Night of Van Gogh and standard theories in fluid dynamics is an amazing example for how intensively our ancestors obviously experienced and believed in their physical environment . Van Gogh painted the laws of physics in a method only he could; the night sky was painted on vision and canvas, where painting meets science. This research also underscores the profound insight Van Gogh had as an artist, suggesting that the greatest value of his work is what it may teach of nature’s hidden beauties.
