One of my research strands is using abstract art as an inspiration for understanding human perception. This talk focuses on one project, analysing the stripe paintings of British artist, Bridget Riley. I investigate whether mathematical measures can characterize this set of paintings. The work is motivated by three considerations: (1) stripe paintings are an incredibly constrained art form, therefore it should be relatively straightforward to ascertain whether or not there is a mathematical characterization; (2) Bridget Riley's approach to composition is methodical and thoughtful, so we can assume that her paintings are carefully constructed rather than random and (3) Riley's paintings can appear random on a first glance but have an underlying structure, therefore Riley's works are challenging to characterize because they are close to random while not actually being so. I investigate entropy (both global and local), separation distance and auto-correlation. I find that all can provide some characterization, that entropy provides the best judge between Riley's work and randomly generated variants, and that the entropy measures correlate well with the art-critical descriptions of Riley's development of this style over the five years in which she worked with it.

The talk is based on "Mathematical characterisation of Bridget Riley's stripe paintings", N. A. Dodgson, Journal of Mathematics and the Arts 6(2-3):89-106, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17513472.2012.679468

Biog: Neil Dodgson is Professor of Computer Graphics at Victoria. His research career has covered the design and development of 3DTV, the mathematical underpinnings of computer-aided design software, and the analysis of abstract art.