Johnny Joannou designs periodic tables for a living and he’s made one including Bollywood hits too!
When was the last time you looked at your Chemistry textbook and said this was impossible to
study? (Perhaps every single time in school) We can imagine what you went through when you were told to write the periodic table a hundred times or when you were asked which was the lightest element on the table (Hydrogen, FYI).
Bollywood, Period
Johnny Joannou loves periodic tables. But before you tremble in fear, the London-based artist makes tables in that format using the most trivial information and creates them into an artwork. Picture this: neatly arranged coloured cells organised according the best test players of all time in Australian cricket divided into bowlers and batsmen, the runs they scored, their average and most number of dismissals. “My wife is a science teacher and so copies of the periodic table have always been around the house. I love the simple way it communicates complex information,” he says. Talk about being geeky!
And so, Joannou creates these multi-coloured Giclée prints on heavy weight Hahnemühle fine art paper of almost everything that fancies him, right from films, books, sports, etc. In 2012, Joannou wanted to gift something for his “football-mad nephew” and decided to design a print for him. “I was inspired by the wonderful football wallcharts of the 1970s. He loved the print.” So he began charting his way to create On A Sixpence, a space where he sells his artwork. Last year, he created one with the greatest hits of Bollywood. “After watching Mehboob Khan's epic masterpiece Mother India for the first time on the big screen, I decided I wanted to identify some of the classics.”
...The idea is not to produce a definitive list of great Bollywood films, but a list that can be a talking point for experts and novices to this wonderful genre.”
How does he do it?
Researching, categorising, arranging key metrics relating to the theme, and then using an
appropriate colour palette to reflect the history of the topic takes about six weeks to complete. The Bollywood print includes films like Om Shanti Om, Devdas and Sholay and each cell includes information on the film title, the director and the year of release. For instance, the cell for Mother India is shown as mI, Khan, 1957. He spent hours in the British Library in London and also received advice from Ashanti Omkar, a BBC presenter “who has a wide knowledge of the art form.” Having a wife who loves Indian cinema helps him too. “I think she has seen Bobby at least ten times. The idea is not to produce a definitive list of great Bollywood films, but a list that can be a talking point for experts and novices to this wonderful genre.”
He’s seen about 20 films from the ones included. “My favourite two films are probably Devdas and Sholay.” The print, he says, is an introduction to some of the classics. “People enjoy the fact that they have to identify the film from the two letters. They find it a challenge.” And so he includes a ‘Crib Sheet’ with all the film titles, just in case a customer cannot identify the film from the two initials and the name of the director.
His project has received kind words from Hollywood directors including Duncan Jones, director of the sci-fi classic Moon and he is currently working on a design to mark the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare's death, and a print for the greatest hip-hop records of all time.
He wonders how people are shocked to learn how geeky he is. Well, we don’t disagree.
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