Three

Size: Triptych 36" wide x 33" tall
        (each piece is 12" wide x 33" tall)

Medium: Mixed Media on Wood

2007

Available through Marion Drennen

Ancient Tally Sticks and Clay Tablets that were used for accounting were the inspiration for this piece. Some glyphs are copies of ancient hieroglyphs that were actually used, some I made up.

Tally sticks were used in the same way we use a tally mark now, to count up to 4, then make a mark across it to signify 5 and so on…because the human eye cannot perceive of more than 4 at one time (see "Five").

When tallies were kept on a piece of wood, it was split in half, with one half kept by the seller and one half kept by the purchaser…to prevent either side from changing the quantities.                                               

There’s a famous painting by J. M. William Turner titled The Burning of The Houses of Lords and Commons. It depicts an 1834 fire in London that was started accidentally because they decided to burn all the old tally sticks.

Charles Dickens said, "… it took until 1826 to get these sticks abolished. In 1834 ... there was a considerable accumulation of them. ... What was to be done with such worn-out worm-eaten, rotten old bits of wood? The sticks were housed in Westminster, and it would naturally occur to any intelligent person that nothing could be easier than to allow them to be carried away for firewood by the miserable people who lived in that neighborhood. However [the sticks were no longer] useful and official routine required that they never should be, and so the order went out that they should be privately and confidentially burned. It came to pass that they were burned in a stove in the House of Lords. The stove, over-gorged with these preposterous sticks, set fire to the paneling; the paneling set fire to the House of Commons; the two houses [of government] were reduced to ashes; architects were called in to build others; and we are now in the second million of the cost thereof."

Big Tally

2006

Size: 36" Wide x 60" Tall
Medium: Acrylic on Canvas

No Longer Available

Big Tally was based on ancient accounting methods. Pre-historic man made notches on bones. In Mesopotamia, 10,000 years ago, the Sumerians developed the first system of abstract numerical representation.

The Mesopotamian cuneiform writing system developed (5,000 years later) from this ancient clay token accounting system. In the 4th millennium B.C., the Mesopotamian accountants began enclosing tokens in clay envelopes (bullae) and impressing the tokens on the outside to indicate the contents.

Later, a pointed stylus was used to incise pictures of tokens in clay tablets instead of impressing the actual tokens. The stylus impressed a wedge shaped mark. (The Latin word cuneus means wedge, thus the name cuneiform.)

In the early token system, the concept of number was not distinct from the concept of the type of item counted. (ie: Ovals were used to represent jars of oil. Jars of oil could only be counted using these ovals.) Gradually, modifications to this accounting system led to an increasingly abstract form of counting.

It wasn’t until about 3,100 B.C. that the first numerals were invented.

To pay homage to those ancient accountants, Big Tally floats in a world of glyphs and marks that allude to quantities, objects, and the recording of information. It is not intended to be an actual depiction of a clay tablet or bulla, only an artist’s interpretation.