THE GARDEN PIANO

THE GARDEN PIANO & THE GARDEN PIANO BAR

This piano was a natural for me to make because I loved being outdoors and had grown up with a large garden in the back yard. An eagerly awaited rite of spring was to help my Dad plant the many rows of vegetables after he had carefully plowed and disked the area and created the rows with his one row cultivator.

Actually I had not thought of this Garden Piano on my own – it was a suggestion by one of my pottery teachers! He suggested the lattice lid and tree trunk legs and my imagination was set loose from then on! I tried to imagine what it would be like to have my piano outdoors. A piano is really just an odd-shaped box containing the strings and mechanism, so maybe it could take on an outdoorsy look if it were supported by two tree trunks and a tree growing up through it to hold up the lid. And a tree would naturally have a bird’s nest in it. And the bird’s nest had to have eggs in it. And the tree needed leaves…and perhaps the piano could be textured as if made of leaves and the music rack could be leaf-shaped hanging down over the front of the instrument and the keys. Do you see how one idea leads to another and another? And it didn’t stop there.

Shortly after creating the Garden Piano, I dined with friends at a local restaurant that had a piano bar. A-Ha! The Garden Piano Bar, complete with “electric” piano and “speakers” was born! Nothing like I had seen in the restaurant, but purely from my imagination upon lingering in the garden! Do you suppose someone will actually build a real Garden Piano Bar? Let me know if you hear of such a place!

The Garden Piano Bar was an early creation and with my imagination running wild with little experience to temper my designs, it was somewhat crazy. I had learned by this point that glazing tiny details was very tedious and that sometimes there is a better way. GLUE! Yes, I have learned that glue is acceptable in the art world and is not a cop-out. So, all those leaves on top of the Garden Piano Bar were glazed (3 coats of under-glaze and 3 coats of glaze), fired separately and glued in place! There were 115 leaves and the E6000 Industrial Glue was applied to both sides, a few at a time, and the timer was set for 8 minutes. When the timer buzzed, the leaves were positioned and held briefly in place. That took all of one Saturday morning. Thank goodness the glue instructions mention having “adequate ventilation!” Even with what I thought was adequate ventilation I had lots of strange dreams that night!

And, speaking of tiny details, this was the piano which first displayed blades of grass. No, they were not glued on. They were fired on and had to be glazed in situ. Too bad I hadn’t found my little curved brush at the time! Now it’s relatively simple to glaze the back side of a blade of grass or other detail without getting the wrong color on some other part.