Abstract
Water appears in ancient Greek and Roman art, on vases, in frescoes, and in mosaics of swimming
fish or boats moving across the sea by oar or sail. Beginning in the Middle Ages, waves, waterfalls,
and liquids pouring from vessels, appear in landscapes and domestic scenes. Italian and Flemish
Renaissance masters endeavored to render nature with the utmost attention to detail and were
able, when their subject called for it, to capture fluid dynamics with astonishing precision.
Including fluid effects has also allowed artists to convey motion in the static medium of painting or
sculpture. Nevertheless, convincing representation of liquid flows, especially oscillatory or
turbulent, has remained a challenge. The invention of non-figurative art proved liberating, leading
Abstract Expressionist painters to adopt fluid phenomena themselves – jets, drips, sprays, and
instabilities of liquid pigment – in the creative process. This talk offers a brief review of the quest
to naturalistically depict fluids, and the alternative tactic of modern artists who learned to deploy
fluids, endowing their abstractions with nature’s own patterns.
