Doug Titchenal
I became an artist and a math enthusiast after a career in print advertising, which required attention to time schedules and a good eye for composition. I work to merge those skills into art that expresses the mathematics and the aesthetics of counting time. An award-winning photographer before making time-inspired art, I eventually branched out into creating mixed media “pictographs” that pair my love of photography with my passion for understanding and “drawing” time. I am captivated by the countless ways I found to visualize, and thus depict, everyday time periods, from the minutes of a day to the days of a year, using colors, dots, and geometric shapes, to help me — and anyone else — think differently about time.
Inspiration for this work was a number essential to daily life —365. It is easily doodled as a geometric shape on graph paper. I later learned that because 13 squared + 14 squared = 365 it is called a centered square. Divided into 30-, 31-, and 28-dot sections, the square image created a compact calendar, shown here with my photographs of a year’s worth of bright seasonal food. By drawing a 27x27 square on graph paper and placing a dot in every other square, you get either 365 or 364 dots, depending on whether your dots start in the corners or one away from the corner. Only with the dots starting in the corner will you get 365 dots, with one in the exact center. Interestingly, 27 squared + 364 squared = 365 squared — a Pythagorean Triple!