An intriguing post by Ilaria Perissi on her blog "boundaries" where she examines in depth the relation of painting and modeling - the latter in the modern sense of using mathematical tools to describe the behavior of complex systems. She goes in depth into describing how Vincent Van Gogh and how his paintings can be seen as models of the world. An excerpt from her post is below, but do read the whole thing; it is fascinating!
The image of the world around us, which we carry in our head, is just a model. Nobody in his head imagines all the world, government or country. He has only selected concepts, and relationships between them, and uses those to represent the real system – Jay Forrester (1971).
Could these sentences represent also a painting process? Is a painter a sort of modeler? Following the rational of previous words, most of the painters are interested in reporting an image of the world and the paintings are just models of that images, including both the material world as well as the rapresentation of feelings and situations; they are not models of the whole world, but of a set of selected concepts and relationships used to represent a real material system, which could be a landscape, a still life, a portrait, a situation or event, as wars, battles, a sunset or a ‘starry night’, ‘potatoes eaters’ and representation of feelings as in the painting 'Sorrowing Old Man' or 'Two lovers'.
