The Structure of Paintings

This talk gives an introduction to Leyton's book The Structure of Paintings in Springer-Verlag. 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. At the basis of this geometry are Leyton's fundamental laws of memory storage, and these laws are shown to determine the structure of artworks. That is, the central argument is that artworks are structured so that they allow the maximal extraction of stored memory. Furthermore, the book demonstrates 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. Leyton's methodology makes the structure and emotional content of an artwork fully definable, rich, systematic and complete. The argument is supported with detailed analyses of paintings by Picasso, Raphael, Cézanne, Gauguin, Modigliani, Ingres, De Kooning, Memling, Balthus and Holbein.

Bio

Michael Leyton's mathematical work on shape has been used by scientists in over 40 disciplines from aerospace engineering to radiology. 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, MIT Press, and Birkhauser. He is president of the International Society for Mathematical and Computational Aesthetics, and is an advisor to NSF on innovation in computer and information sciences and engineering, as well as on software committees at ISO and NASA. Besides his scientific work, he is also a highly exhibited painter and sculptor, and his architecture designs have been published by Birkhauser-Architectural. He is the keynote and invited speaker in conferences on virtually every scientific and artistic discipline. Currently, he is 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. Professor Leyton is on the faculty of the DIMACS Center for Discrete Mathematics and Theoretical Computer Science, at Rutgers.

Prof. Michael Leyton's Homepage