I have been reading Philip Ball's trilogy on nature's capacity to generate patterns, and found an interesting observation in the second book, "Flow". The author had just finished a discussion of how points in a vortex or eddy (think rushing stream), are related to one another. If they weren't related to one another, it wouldn't look like an eddy. He notes that researchers had investigated whether Van Gogh's "Starry Night", which shows a turbulent night sky, might technically match the metrics of turbulence found in other flows, like rivers. Lo and behold, the painting does! Other paintings, particularly ones done during his times of greatest mental disturbance, also accurately match mathematical models of turbulence.