A good friend of mine actually started the inspiration for this. My friend Dave Yaden is a piano player from L.A. and has played piano with all sorts of musicians in his time. So when I had the idea of doing a musical piece, and being it was only my third piece I had created, I figured start with something I was already inspired by.
I had a black and white photo, or was it sepia tone, of piano keys from eye level looking down the piano. And if anyone out there knows Dave Yaden you know why this photo relates to him. This image was a tattered and torn kind of image and reminds me of when I was at King’s Island when I was little and you could dress up in the old western style clothing and have your photo taken. This is exactly where that image comes from.
I took that image and wanted to create a very close duplicate of the piano keys themselves. So i did just that. I began to add some color and when I was finished I loved the result but it looked too much like what I had started with. So I took the same image I had just created and flipped it around and make some adjustments to the colors on the second image. I repeated that process twice more and what you see in front of you is a piece aptly titled ‘Piano Keys’. Dave does not know this piece was inspired by him and if he ever finds out I hope the first thing he does is call me to yell at me for not telling him sooner. But this, being a very young piece in my collection, made me unsure if it was worth anything. This piece actually has had quite the reception from the general public.
This piece was featured in Indy.com Magazine as well as Pulse Magazine and on the cover of the Brazil Times. It was also a featured piece in Oranje 2008 and Gallery 7 Presents “I Like It. What is It?”. The piece is actually so fond to me that it is hanging in my apartment as we speak.
