MULTIFRACTAL STRUCTURE IN SAND DRAWINGS

Abstract

The construction of an abstract expressionist artwork is driven by chaotic mechanisms that sculpt multifractal characteristics. Jackson Pollock’s paintings, for example, arise due to the random process of depositing drops and jets of paint on a canvas. However, most of the paintings and drawings try to recreate with fidelity common forms, natural landscapes, and the human figure. Accordingly, in the context of the formation of statistically self-similar objects, a question persists: will it be possible to find some vestige of multifractal structure in drawings or paintings whose elaboration process tries to avoid chaos? In this work, we scrutinize into several artistic drawings in sand to answer this intriguing question. These pieces of art are elaborated using craters, furrows, and sand piles; and some of them are inscribed on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. We prove that the sand drawings analyzed here are multifractal objects. This finding suggests that a piece of visual art, which may initially appear ordered, contains many components distributed at different degrees of self-similarity that substantially increase the structural complexity.