Travelin’ Man, Travelin’ Piano

To completely cover a piano with beads, artist John K. Lawson said, “You really have to start from the center and work your way out. I’d make drawings and then draw the design onto the piano with Sharpie markers. Anything one hundred years old has its own energy, so I’d let the piano dictate the design.”

Lawson’s beaded piano Temptation is currently in residence at Cocha Restaurant in Baton Rouge. It’s been on the move for twenty years.

The instrument, which Lawson dates to around 1910, is what he calls a “honky tonk” piano, an upright that was in a New Orleans bar until 1997. Friends bought the bar but didn’t want the piano. They offered it to Lawson because they knew he had already decorated a piano with beads.

[Speaking of Cocha: Read our profile of the restaurant's genesis and an interview with Chef Jourdan Fulbright.]

Lawson collected Mardi Gras beads for more than two decades. Each year, after Carnival ended, he would grab a shopping cart and a bunch of contractor bags and roam the St. Charles Avenue parade route. He stuffed each bag with beads grabbed from the street, stashed them in the yard of a friend, and returned later to collect the bags. He’d fit as many bags as he could into the shopping cart and push them to the Audubon Hotel on St. Charles, where he was renting an apartment on the third floor. After hauling the bags up three flights of stairs, he washed the beads in the bathtub, then sorted them by color.

To complete Temptation, Lawson spent three months in the summer of 1997 working nine or ten hours a day in a rented warehouse in Central City, meticulously gluing hundreds of thousands of beads onto the piano with a glue gun filled with airplane glue.

The piano is better traveled than some people. “Around 1997 Dave and Dez Crawford bought it for the Spanish Moon bar in Baton Rouge. A month or two later they told me, ‘It’s just getting beat up here.’ I traded two cypress doors that I had done carvings on for the piano. For a year or two, it was at Barrister’s Gallery on Royal Street in the French Quarter [now on St. Claude Avenue]. Curator Tom Patterson saw it there and asked to exhibit it in the High on Life exhibit at the American Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore.”

The piano was at the Baltimore Museum from 2002 until 2003, after which it went back and forth to New York, to the Berkshires in Massachusetts, and to Asheville, North Carolina, before Lawson loaded the piano into a pickup truck and brought it home to Louisiana this past spring.

Lawson was friends with Saskia Spanhoff, who co-owns Cocha restaurant in downtown Baton Rouge with her husband, Enrique Pinerua. “They had commissioned beadwork from me for the restaurant,” said Lawson. “Since May, the piano has been on view there.” 

Lawson has bopped back and forth almost as much as his piano, having traveled all over Europe, Scandinavia, and North Africa. Speaking rapidly in his British accent, he frequently detours and backs up.

Born in Birmingham, England, he grew up in Suffolk and studied naval architecture at Plymouth University in Devon. When he got an offer to attend any American university through a student exchange program he chose LSU. “I was basically a ship builder. I knew I wanted to come to Louisiana after I saw the [1981] movie Southern Comfort, with a soundtrack by Ry Cooder. I came to LSU because I wanted to experience the culture, the music. The movie was set in the Atchafalaya. I had traveled all over, but I had never seen the swamp.

“Suffolk, where I grew up, had a landscape similar to Louisiana—water, marsh, estuaries, owls, ducks, herons. I feel like we are floating here. We’re so governed by the climate.”

LSU was a bit of a culture shock. “I’m sitting there with a career counselor. In England, university was still very formal, but he was wearing a purple T-shirt with a tiger on it that said ‘Geaux Tigers’ and a huge LSU ring. He said, ‘We don’t have no naval architecture here, but we have landscape architecture.’ I raised my hand and said, ‘Sign me up!’”

LSU’s Landscape Architecture department was founded by Robert Reich in 1944. In 2007, the program he had started, shaped, and sustained for more than sixty-three years was renamed for him. Reich died in 2010 at the age of 97.

Lawson considered himself Reich’s protégé. “His spry old self took me under his wing and got me an apartment for sixty dollars a month on Ivanhoe Street [near the North Gate of LSU; Reich owned several apartments. in the area.] He pushed me into design, painting, drawing, and art.” Lawson rode along on landscape planting sites with his mentor. “He’d tell me to stand over there and pretend I was a tree,” he said with a laugh.

While at LSU, Lawson worked as a cook at the Gumbo Place restaurant on Chimes Street. “People would compliment the gumbo and ask to meet the chef and this punk rocker would come out,” he said. “I was meeting everybody.”

In England, university was still very formal, but he was wearing a purple T-shirt with a tiger on it that said ‘Geaux Tigers’ and a huge LSU ring. He said, ‘We don’t have no naval architecture here, but we have landscape architecture.’ I raised my hand and said, ‘Sign me up!’”

Lawson, a lover of the blues, hung out at Tabby’s Blues Box on North Boulevard, a funky club that was torn down in 1999. Later he became good friends with owner Tabby Thomas. 

“He’d let me sleep upstairs after the club closed for the night,” Lawson said. “Tabby didn’t want me driving back down to the river when I lived in Sunshine. There was an assortment of people sleeping up there. The cleaning lady would kick us out in the morning.”

Lawson characterized his life on the River Road as “a very Thoreau type existence. I would walk to Sunshine from Baton Rouge. I used to walk a lot up and down the levee.” 

Lawson married Baton Rouge native Aimée Michel, whom he’d met in 1986 in Dartmoor, England; the couple’s son Sebastian was born in 2002. In 2005, the Lawsons were vacationing in Maine when Hurricane Katrina struck. When they finally returned to their home in New Orleans to check out the damage, they found they had had nine feet of water in the house and eleven feet in Lawson’s garage studio. 

Lawson describes the scene as “classic Katrina. We had to put on those white [hazmat] suits, rubber gloves, and respirators. We hired a man who went in with me to shovel stuff out. All Aimée’s antique furniture had disintegrated. The fridge had somehow floated into another room. We had to take it apart to get it out the back door. The only thing that survived intact was an eight-foot-long cypress table I had made.”

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Thousands of Lawson’s drawings had been damaged although they were stored in a fireproof file cabinet. “They were soaked. I emptied water out of the drawers, put the drawings and Polaroids into three garbage bags, and took them back to our friends’ house in Sunshine. It was a three or four day process to lay them out in the sun and gently peel them apart.”

Lawson made new art from the damaged work, using pieces of the drawings in collages.

Since returning to Louisiana from New England this past May with the piano, he has set up a studio and gallery in Sunshine. In July, he took a job as a program specialist with the Knock Knock Children’s Museum in Baton Rouge, which opened last month (see facing page). 

“I’m part of a four-man team teaching art through play,” said Lawson, who hopes the museum will become the final resting place of his wandering piano. 

“It’s been this cyclic journey. My goal is to have it stay in Louisiana, because then it will have come full circle.” 

For more information about John Lawson’s artwork and other projects,visit lawsonworks.com.

Ruth Laney can be reached at ruthlaney@cox.net.