I just got back from painting a mural in a cafe in my hometown of Lubbock, TX. At about 38' x 12', it's the largest I've done so far. Once I blocked in the main subjects (a stellated dodecahedron, a bison, and the coffeeshop's logo), I spent the majority of my time painting grass & clouds. I could paint grass and clouds all day, for a lot of days in a row, I think. It's the texture. I love how the same patterns of intermittent light and shadow layer themselves over and over in sky and landscape. So, I spent several days last week staring at this wall from a foot away, then driving around West Texas in the evenings, enjoying the cool evening breeze, barely registering the highways and signs and buildings, just seeing textures repeating in the asphalt and trees and buffalo grass.
There's a school of thought that suggests that we are hardwired to recognize these patterns in plants, and brick walls, and hair and faces - that that's what makes certain works of art stand up over the years - they replicate, somehow, the textures that we see all around us.
We all know that Art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize truth - at least the truth that is given us to understand. The artist must know the manner whereby to convince others of the truthfulness of his lies.
-Pablo Picasso
If a painting of a tree was only the exact representation of the original, so that it looked just like the tree, there would be no reason for making it; we might as well look at the tree itself. But the painting, if it is of the right sort, gives something that neither a photograph nor a view of the tree conveys.
-Calvin Coolidge
Here's one for you: is it possible to use some sort of mathematical method to quantify art? To assess in some way the effectiveness of the artist's method of convincing others of "the truthfulness of his (or her) lies"? I think the answer lies in texture and pattern, specifically the way in which art imitates the fractal nature of our universe. (Fractal is simply a term that describes shapes or structures that repeat at different scales. Snowflakes, mountain ranges, ferns - all look very similar at a small scale to the way they do at larger ones.) These patterns are present throughout nature, and we're very deeply attuned to them.
The answer, by the way, to the question of whether science can objectively quantify art still seems to be a resounding "No". A researcher tried to do that very thing with a fractal analysis of Jackson Pollock's paintings awhile back. It turns out that they are indeed fractal in nature (see video below), but it's still impossible to determine whether or not disputed paintings were done by Pollock. There's a fun rundown at http://overweeninggeneralist.blogspot.com/2012/11/drippy-jackson-pollock-theories-art-and.html
It seems the line between art and science remains unassailable. Still, there would be no art at all, I think, if we were not so hardwired to seek patterns. To relate new things to more familiar ones. We categorize ("That's a dog") and stereotype ("That's a starving artist"). We seek to understand the world by noticing the same patterns repeated on different scales: nautilus shells, hurricanes, spiral galaxies. In our dreams, we transmute mundane objects into symbols, as our subconscious mind attempts to organize our experiences. And artists (and poets, and musicians...) do the same thing. Sometimes, well enough that their works bear a second or third look.