In a 2012 article in  Leonardo , Lior Shamir presented an image analysis of 513 works of art created by 9 well-known artists. The analysis used the  Wndchrm  algorithm, which is based on a large collection of numerical image content descriptors. The conclusion, surprising at first glance, was that the two artists whose work was most similar to one another were Vincent van Gogh, a post-Impressionist, and Jackson Pollock, an Abstract Expressionist. Nevertheless, in retrospect, the essence of the strong similarity can be captured in a single word, employed by Leonardo da Vinci some 500 years ago:  turbulence . The goal of this project is to create a software system that provides an artist-directable framework for composing paintings that naturally carry the energy of turbulent flow. To this end, a 3D lattice-Boltzmann model is used to simulate flows with Reynolds numbers on the order of 10 million, e.g., air flow at 100 m/s, and this is coupled with a particle system generated by a commercial package,  Houdini , to provide a 3D turbulent flow of paint droplets. At the user's option, the 3D flow can be captured by an arbitrarily placed, simulated canvas.
['Chuqiao Wang', 'Sam Wang', 'Robert Geist']
Painting with turbulence