REPRESENTATIONAL SPACETIME

I need this page to clearly state how Representational Spacetime is defined in Transparent Drawing.  Representational Spacetime is one of the Four Spacetimes, and I realized that I don’t have a page specifically addressing it.

Representational Spacetime (RS) means that you are drawing so as to depict one instant of time.  There is one viewpoint.  Typically the projection is a linear perspective.  Everything is opaque.  All the lines of Universe are unique to your eye and your eye alone.

If you operate in RS, your basic problem is to try to apply to your paper lines and tones which comply with a culturally accepted vocabulary.  So if you are drawing a tree, what you put on your paper must conform to the accepted graphic requirements of society.  Your basic task is to arrange a series of shapes on your paper which, when seen within a cultural context, makes the viewer say, yep, that’s a tree.

In RS, what you put on your paper will be judged in accordance with culturally accepted and defined standards.  For example, in the Renaissance, if you got the (at that time) unimaginable notion to paint a picture using a style like van Gogh’s, you would have been promptly locked up in the loony bin.   So your goal in RS is to find a way to acknowledge and support the mode, means and methods that your culture offers as a range of a means of expression.

So much of RS is the depiction and illustration of nature.  As in, how things look when you look at them.  And the only way that you can do this is respond to light.  You must apply opaque blobs of paint to a canvas which are tonally different from adjacent tones.  You turn gradations of light into blobs of paint.  How you adjust the tone, the hue, and the contrast dictates whether what you put on your paper or canvas is “good.”  If the way you apply these opaque blobs is not per the accepted cultural vocabulary, then you are not any good at drawing or painting.

In short, a depiction in RS can represent nature.  But what is depicted on the canvas, wall, or paper in Representational Spacetime is never how nature is.

I could keep going on drawing (pun) analogies and comparisons.  I could say that RS contains, relatively, very little knowledge.  I could go on to say that RS was a way of providing societal control by placing God, and your eye, in the center of it all, all at the same time.

But I won’t.  Because I’d rather ask, what about that picture at the top of the page?  Why did I include this culturally iconic nugget?  Well, it’s a dead on ringer for a one point linear perspective.  It is certainly in Representational Spacetime done by DaVinci at the height of the Renaissance.  In fact, I wonder why this representation is not taught in drawing 101?  Just look at the rigid geometric space that they are having supper in.  Ching should have included this in his books.  What a room!

But doesn’t it give you a hankering for transparency?  As in, what’s the space like beyond those dark panels along the sides?  What is that landscape that you can see thru the back wall openings really doing?  What is wall behind us doing:  does it have the same three window openings that we see in the back?  And what is the overall shape of the building?  Is there an olive grove next door?

RS does not permit the answering of the questions posed above.  RS can only ask whether you, the viewer, interpret the adjacent blobs of paint as something that you recognize.  RS also asks the question whether you can share, with the artist, a common emotion, based on a shared cultural understanding, of how the world should be represented.