Getting dressed this morning, I thought about the osteoporosis experiment - the clinical trial. "Why would I ever want to go to a doctor who wasn't interested in me as a whole person?" But the staff doing the clinical trial aren't paid to deal with me as a whole person - only to measure certain factors that are part of the experimental design.
What struck me is that there must be some application to art. Isn't it possible to make art while only paying attention to certain factors, not to the piece as a whole? What pops to mind is a study of some element - line, say, or perspective. Or the kind of Hofmann exercise I've been doing lately.
But I'm not just talking about exercises for study. What would it mean to pay attention to the work of art as a whole? To the work as a whole being? As a subject?
OK, now we're getting down to it. This is the ideal of course - for the painting or bowl or cartoon to have its full life and being and subjecthood. If the artist can't or won't relate that way to the work - then who can? And how could the work be fully realized, fully alive?
That's certainly PART of the answer as to how Pollock painted the fractals. He made it his full intention to relate completely to the painting and to what the painting wanted. And of course he was willing to leave behind all the prescriptions of what a painting is, and how it should be done.
This last part - being willing to leave behind all the prescriptions, all the established ways of "doing it right," even all the definitions of what "it" is (what a painting is, what a sculpture is) - this is what all the artists did who worked ahead of the scientists. (I'm thinking here of Art and Physics,by Leonard Shlain. That's the book that describes how certain artists expressed in their paintings and sculptures, ideas that were only later expressed or discovered in physics. Shlain talks about Pollock but at the time he wrote the book, the computer analysis hadn't been done yet - the analysis that showed Pollock was painting perfect fractals.
Now I'm thinking about Monet, who didn't do caricatures to earn money to feed his family because he needed all his time to try to capture what he saw. I'm thinking about Matisse, who changed from a lucrative and popular way of painting just after he "had it made," to a way of painting that brought him scorn and poverty. I'm thinking about Henry Moore, whose first exhibition of ten years worth of sculpture brought devastingly negative reviews.
This is the kind of strength of character required to make real art, isn't it? Art that expresses nature from the inside? Art that helps the world evolve?
6:29:33 PM 
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