Vincent van Gogh’s 👩🎨 colours were not just emotional explosions💥; they were experiments🧪⚗️👨🔬. Could his “box of yarns”🧶 reveal that he thought like a scientist?
What connects a scientist writing equations and an artist mixing pigments on a palette? Both are model builders and explorers who translate complex realities into forms that the mind can grasp.
In my recent article "From Yarns to Canvas: Modelling as a Path to Knowledge in Van Gogh’s Creative Process", published in Foundations of Science (Springer, 2025), I suggest that Vincent van Gogh’s creative process can be understood as a profound act of modelling, not only artistic, but also cognitive and epistemic.
Art as Experiment, Colour Theories as Model
Scientific models have long been used to make sense of the invisible, as per the Bohr’s model of the atom or Euclidean geometry, with points, planes and lines. Models simplify, abstract, and teach us how systems behave. Yet modelling is not the scientist’s privilege: it is a universal cognitive🧠🤯 tool, one that also shapes the way artists think and create.
By examining Van Gogh’s letters, the writings of Émile Bernard, and the Van Gogh Museum’s digital archive, I explored how the artist’s engagement with "Chevreul colour model" and his famous “box of yarns” acted as a tangible modelling device. The painter arranged threads of coloured wool to test combinations and contrasts before applying them to canvas. A tactile, predictive experiment remarkably similar to how scientists use simulations to anticipate results before experimentation.
Van Gogh and the Dynamics of Creativity
Analysing 717 of Van Gogh’s paintings, I found that his productivity fluctuated in recognisable cycles, with sharp peaks in 1885 and 1888, followed by decline and recovery. These oscillations can be interpreted through the Lotka–Volterra model, originally developed to describe predator–prey dynamics.
Like an ecosystem, Van Gogh’s creativity depended on the interaction of internal and external “resources”: emotional energy, technical skill, materials, and environment. When these elements aligned, production surged; when they depleted, creativity waned, only to regenerate anew. His creative process, viewed through this lens, behaves as a complex adaptive system.
A Universal Language of Understanding
This perspective reframes Van Gogh as neither purely intuitive nor tormented, but as a methodical experimenter. His “box of yarns” becomes not merely a painter’s accessory but a cognitive instrument, a way of modelling the landscapes, of testing hypotheses through colour, light, and perception.
Ultimately, modelling emerges as a universal language of understanding that bridges art and science. Whether through equations or through colours, humans use models to explore complexity, reduce uncertainty, and transform perception into knowledge. Van Gogh’s paintings, in this sense, are not only artworks; they are visual simulations of how his cognition turned complexities into paintings.