The Structure of Paintings

Artworks and the emotions they create can be mapped mathematically, according to artist, architect, sculptor, musician — and mathematician — Michael Leyton. On Wednesday, March 25, he discusses “The Generative Structure of Paintings” at Santa Fe Complex beginning at 6:30pm. He’ll also give a talk at the Center for Nonlinear Systems in Los Alamos on Thursday, the 26th, about the “Generative Theory of Shape.”

Based on his new book, The Structure of Paintings, Leyton argues that art is structured to allow the maximal extraction of stored memory. His argument includes the emotion expressed by art, which, he says, is actually memory extracted by these laws and, therefore, subject to systematic and rigorous mapping. His argument is supported with detailed analyses of paintings by Picasso, Raphael, Cézanne, Gauguin, Modigliani, Ingres, De Kooning, Memling, Balthus and Holbein.

In a series of 4 books, Leyton has developed new foundations for geometry in which shape is equivalent to memory storage. A principal argument of these foundations is that artworks are maximal memory stores and these laws determine the structure of artworks. That is, artworks are structured to allow the maximal extraction of stored memory. Layton also argues that the emotion expressed by an artwork is actually the memory extracted by the laws. Therefore, the laws of memory storage allow the systematic and rigorous mapping not only of the compositional structure of an artwork, but also of its emotional expression.

This fundamentally opposes the view that the emotional expression of an artwork is undefinable while making the structure and emotional content of an artwork fully definable, rich, systematic and complete. He supports his argument with detailed analyses of paintings by Picasso, Raphael, Cézanne, Gauguin, Modigliani, Ingres, De Kooning, Memling, Balthus and Holbein.

In addition to his research in mathematics, Michael Leyton is a well-known artist, architect, sculptor and musician. (Information about his work is available here. He is currently writing a 4-volume work on the foundations of science, with particular emphasis on quantum mechanics. He also continues to work on the structure of software, as well as interoperability and large-scale engineering systems integration, in the mechanical/aerospace industry.

His mathematical work on shape has been used by scientists in over 40 disciplines from chemical engineering to meteorology. His scientific contributions have received major prizes, such as a presidential award and a medal for scientific achievement. His new foundations to geometry are elaborated in his books in Springer-Verlag and MIT Press. Besides his scientific and mathematical work, he is also a highly exhibited painter and sculptor, and his architecture designs have been published by Birkhauser-Architectural. He is president of the International Society for Mathematical and Computational Aesthetics, and is on the faculty of the Psychology Department and the DIMACS Center for Discrete Mathematics and Theoretical Computer Science at Rutgers University. His Rutgers webpage is here.