SELF TIME EXPOSURE

It never occurred to me to draw a plaza, or square, or piazza, until Teresa suggested it.  We had walked thru St. John’s Square in Trogir, Croatia, for three days.  We had gone into the church and the church bell tower.  We had seen the open air pavilion.  We had crossed the plaza in different directions at different times of the day.  This set of experiences produced a unique self time exposure.

Most of the fabric surrounding the square was built in the mid 1400s.  Although the basic geometry of the Square was established by the Romans in around 1100.

After I realized that indeed this would be fun to draw, I used the panoramic feature on my phone to take long horizontal shots.  And with these shots, coupled with the memory of having explored many of the facets of the plaza and surrounding fabric over three days, It was really fun to draw it.

It is a unique experience to draw fabric that you have experienced over a broad time window that spans days.  When we draw a building, for example, the time window is rather narrow.  There might be a few minutes or less that you spend taking two or three photos from two different sides of the building.  And that is the time window.  But with a plaza, given that I visited the church on the first afternoon, and then walked thru the open pavilion where there were singers the next day, and then sat on the wall in front of the cathedral and ate an ice cream cone that afternoon, and then heard an accordian orchestra play Michael Jackson that evening (it was excellent);  this is a very wide time window.  So when you draw so as to provide unification to these experiences, there is something uniquely gratifying to this act.

You cannot draw a holistic fabric in Representational Spacetime that spans a two day time exposure.  That is to say, your exposure, or rather the time that you spend in the Square over two days, is unsummarizable using the ordinary trope of representation and opacity.  It makes me wonder what additional knowledge a drawing would impart if my time exposure were doubled.