How To Paint a Piano In 5 Days

How To Paint a Piano In 5 Days

Sing for Hope Pianos 2013

Theme: “Our Universal Language”

Day 5: Completion

I don’t know what else to say besides these two words: WE FINISHED.

Yes, we finished painting an entire piano. 5 days. 26 hours. 2 Fibonnaci spirals. 1 piece of piano sheet music. 9 planets. Countless stars and comets.

  

I cannot even begin to describe that moment when we stepped back and looked at our baby, the piano that we primed, painted, splattered, repainted, wrote on, repainted… The Lion King finale song was was playing in the background as we finally untaped everything, as we peeled away the plastic, as we finally put forth this work of art to the world.

And I played that piano. Its keys are a little light, a little loose, the notes a little flat, the high F sticks, but god it was an amazing feeling to finally lay my hands on those old piano keys and play it. Play it for what its worth — a toiled over, well earned piece of artistic success.

Day 4: Where Magnificence is REALLY born

We are so close to done!! It’s like that feeling I get when I’m closing in on the last few pages of the last chapter of a massive novel, fingers flying, mind rigged high on adrenaline, the swelling orchestral music of the Lion King finale song (this song, at 4:21) playing in my head. It’s that fast flying exhilaration of nothing but pure success.

The spirals are done. There are stars. There are planets that look like planets, planets that are actually perfect circles! — we decided to be smart, proactive, efficient for the first time in 4 days on the project and used the rims of paint mixing buckets as stencil guides. There are silver and white splatters and shooting stars and comets and all the brilliant, glorious things!

This is where we can taste the finish. This here is the culmination of a piano interest rescued out of countless tear-soaked hours of practice and years upon years of drawing and painting lessons. This is what it looks like to put everything aside (spring break, relaxation, sleep, time, money, JHU schoolwork) to something you truly love. And we are so close to doing it.

These were taken off of Esette’s camera, because her camera does amazing things…

Day 3: Where magnificence is born

Day 3: PRODUCTIVITY!! Oh god so much productivity. We’re beginning to see the light at the end of the tunnel of black acrylic paint! We can see the end of this!

After nearly 8 hours of painting (10am - 6pm or so), we successfully…
-drew in the purple/blue arm of the spiral
-drew in the silver staff lines and treble clef of the sheet music (I was breathing sharpie fumes for way too long for it to be healthy)
-did a second layer of black acrylic
-started splattering white and silver stars
-got paint EVERYWHERE (hair, hands, arms, jeans…)
-TALKED TO PEOPLE! We talked to some other artists today and were social instead of being hermits in our corner of the studio. It was glorious. Everyone seems so nice, and there are so many amazing pianos and ideas being born in this very room! This is the birthplace of another wave of art and we are living it!!

Note to any SFH artists reading this: Esette & I made a lot of purple. If the purple is not done by this Friday, before we leave to go back to Hopkins, feel free to come by and take whichever shade you may need.That is all.

There are a lot of exclamation marks, I know. Today was just so gloriously exciting and productive. It’s finally coming together!!!!

Day #2: Nothing to report

Day 2: Nothing to report…. It was a long and gruelling day. We thought sketching double Fibonacci spirals would be exhausting. We were so wrong.

The true exhaustion came when we spent roughly 3 hours filling in and refilling in the spaces between the silver lines of a music staff. We were all alone in a dark and cold dimly lit warehouse with no one for company besides the studio manager, Elizabeth, and the singular ominous notes produced by the one piano technician working in the corner. It was like something out of a horror movie.

It was not a good day. We shall not speak of it again

Day 1: Prime, Measure, Sketch, Paint!

Painting Day #1. We drew not one, but two Fibonacci spirals over the piano!

Definitely a long and productive day: two hours of priming, another almost  2 hours trying to figure out the spirals, and then yet another 1-1.5 hours painting almost all of it black.
Lower back hurts, one finger is sore from balancing the weight of a heavy brush for several hours, fingertips are still white from the primer (that stuff just
won’t wash off). But we were so productive!

A Preliminary Look

When paint actually touched the canvas! It’s messy and it needs work, but we’re so proud of it.

Paint on my hands

There is paint on my fingertips… all over my hands… but none on any canvas or paper.

Piano-painting-partner Esette and I decided to practice paint today, perhaps throw together a solid concept of what we plan on doing to the piano that Sing For Hope is entrusting us to paint. She brought brushes, acrylics, canvases…

We were equipped and ready to go! … we got this far:

We won’t be disclosing our theme yet, but there is a galaxy involved, some Fibonacci, some stars, maybe Pikachu star. And since neither of us know anything about or galaxies, or the stars, we decided to consult our physics major friend. We learned a lot of interesting things. Such as:

“Guys, your spiral is wrong. Most galaxies don’t spiral clockwise. You need to make the spiral counterclockwise.” (so yes, we fixed it)

On the possibility of including Bohr models and orbitals

(imagine this in Esette’s unnamed accent)
“So you see here. Thees, thees is orbeetal. I can see you don’t understand it. That’s ok — we don’t need to understand. We just need to draw.”
“God I hate chemistry.”
“It’s ok. Chemistry hates you too.”

Our friend introduced us to pulsars, to which Esette responds:

“So there’s lines here that curve like this and this thing go FSHOOOM.”

Yep. All in a day’s good work.

Two Girls. One Piano. And a whole lotta paint.

2 years ago, 88 pianos were dotted across the five boroughs of New York City in a public project—Pop Up Pianos—created by nonprofit organization Sing for Hope. For two weeks, everything from Chopsticks to Chopin was played across the streets of NY by everyone ranging from inexperienced passerby to Juilliard students, five year olds with a week’s worth of experience to hidden talents buried in hands that look like they’ve never touched a piano.

2 years ago, I was the girl who quit piano in fifth grade after six years of intensive lessons, refused to touch the damn thing obstructing living room space for three years, and slowly tried to reteach herself everything she had lost in those lost years. By July 2010, I had retaught myself enough to manage a rendition of Chopsticks and Fur Elise (but not Chopin) on a piano covered in peacocks and peonies in the middle of Times Square, NYC.

This year, Sing For Hope (with help from Chobani) are bringing back the Pop-up Pianos, and with it another fresh round of amazing artwork to be displayed and performed in the streets of New York. Thanks to the wonders of social media, I found their artist application via Facebook and convinced my friend to join me in this crazy whim of applying to design a piano.

AND WE WERE ACCEPTED.

I’ll spare you the recap of my screaming and jumping up and down—it was like getting into college all over again—but in the upcoming weeks, Esette Negussie and I will be embarking on a journey to paint a freaking piano. And in the first two weeks of June, our piano will join one of 88 across the city, a painted message of universal connections, a display of the culmination of our years of art lessons, a testament to the amazing opportunities entrenched in the artistic visions of two crazy college girls, one piano, and a whole lot of paint.

2011 Pop up Piano -- Times Square

PS. This summer, I will finally be playing Chopin.