An Interesting Marriage

Posted at 8:30 PM, Thursday, December 4, 2008

I was greatly entertained by the story shared in "The Australian" several weeks ago by the wife of frenetic Australian movie director Scott Hicks. She told how her mother had instructed her, "Never marry a boring person." What terrific advice! I was not likewise directed in my choice of a lifetime partner, but have managed nevertheless to have landed in a marriage which is anything but dull.

After a first year spent floundering about in the alien environment of Australia, Bobby ultimately decided that the best thing to do would be to enrol in art school. Since he was the only one in his immediate family who had never attended art school, this wasn't such a leap as it might seem. In fact, just about everyone in Bobby's family is frightfully talented in the art area, and Bobby is no exception. As it turned out, studying fine arts is considerably easier to do in South Australia than just about anywhere in America. To my great amusement, education in the fine arts is classified as vocational training! This means that high-quality arts education with a practical approach is available at vocational tuition; Bobby enrolled as a 2/3 time student in the TAFE Arts Institute and paid a grand total of $1200 for a full year's schooling. He has absolutely adored his studio classes, although it's taken just about the full year for him to recall how to be a student again. He's also had a tough time adjusting to his classmates, who are almost all half his age and of the female sort.

Lately, I accused Bobby of enrolling in art school so that he would have a legitimate excuse to play. He couldn't really deny that this was part of his motivation. He's spent a great deal of the last couple of months working on a final project he entitled "anachrofacts: ingenious artifacts with imaginary histories." He started with a plan to produce the periodic table of the elements in hieroglyphics, Mayan script, and Sumerian cuneiform. We even ordered papyrus from Egypt, but Bobby ran out of time after making this excellent first start in ancient Egyptian numbers.



Ultimately, he settled on making cuneiform tiles. He created a little mold that allowed him to roll out fairly identical clay tiles. He then painstakingly incised the names and numbers of the elements using a stylus he had carved for this purpose. Here is a picture of four of them, including gold, silver and tin. You'll notice that the fourth element has a cat's pawprint in place of a cuneiform character. This is an element which doesn't appear in nature, and Bobby adopted this symbol to show that. The numbers of the elements appear on the top part of the tile, and the symbols in the middle are the elements themselves. Bobby particularly enjoyed these, because he was able to use the original Sumerian language for gold, silver, and tin. (By the way, he learned just about all of his Sumerian on the internet.)



Over two very long days, he either reproduced or made up characters to represent all the elements that exist in nature. Once they were dry, he coated them all with multiple coats of lacquer, then glued them on to a sheet of MDF. Here is the nearly-finished product. (He did lacquer the MDF as well so it ended up looking much less splotchy.)



Bobby showed his periodic table, along with a few stray tiles, at the Arts Institute Art Bazaar this afternoon. He sold three tiles at $5 each and answered lots of questions about his rather whacky artistic concept. I'll hold my breath to see what he comes up with next!