Over the summer, Mark Anderson, Presbyterian College’s Marianne and Elwood Gray Lassiter professor of art applied for and was chosen to paint two new Perzina pianos for charity.

Learning about the project through the Spartanburg Artists’ Guild, Anderson donated his time and talent to painting the two pianos.

“As a life-long amateur musician and former piano teacher, I’ve always loved music in general and the instrument in particular,” said Anderson. “More broadly and more fundamentally, I believe the arts play a crucial role in humanizing, inspiring, healing and restoring our culture.”

The first piano was raffled off at the Third Annual World Masterwork Series Benefit Concert on Aug. 29 at Chapman Cultural Center in Spartanburg to support the Spartanburg Music Foundation. The second piano is to be auctioned off on Sept. 5 at the Diana Wortham Theatre in Asheville to benefit Asheville’s Mission Foundation program “Ladies Night Out,” which provides free mammograms and health screenings to uninsured and underinsured women.

The concept for the two pianos began first with the program for the benefit concert, titled “A Night at the Opera: A Rare Two-Piano Fantasy.” Featuring the young piano prodigy Christopher Tavernier and his teacher, John Cobb, the well-attended dual concert featured Mozart’s Don Giovanni and Bellini’s Norma to many standing ovations.

These two operas became the basis for Anderson’s first piano, titled “Vision after the Sermon: A Night at the Opera.” The two opera figures frame “a conceptual space rooted in St. Francis preaching to the birds [and] St. Francis of Paola windsurfing his cloak toward a bridge and a heavenly or cosmic dream vision unfolding under the piano lid.”

The second piano, “Resonance,” focuses more specifically on breast cancer. Anderson painted the piano as a tribute to family members and friends who had survived or died from breast cancer. This piano features St. Agatha of Sicily, the patron saint of those with breast cancer, and a central image of Raphael as the Archangel of Healing dropping a golden staff into a pool of healing waters.

Both pianos complement each other as opposites “aiming at the two sides of one significant revelation,” Anderson explained. Inspired by Van Gogh and Gauguin’s own back-and-forth artwork discourse, Anderson sought for these two pianos to do the same and added elements of both artists’ styles as tributes within the paintings.

The visually stunning images on both pianos attest to Anderson’s skill as a painter and demonstrate his expressionist and dream-based interests. He approached both pianos as dreams with overlapping layers and landscapes. His background in psychology, art and music culminated in the creation of two pianos possessing vibrantly ethereal dreamscapes that combine the heavenly with the earthly into one extraordinary visual and emotional experience.

Quoting a jazz pianist’s advice that music was more than just playing the right notes, but about finding the “sweet stuff [between] the cracks”, Anderson said that “making visual art on the body of a musical instrument is a little like that.”

“Something interesting happens in the parallel spaces of visual and aural resonance,” Anderson continued. “That resounding pattern, like the expectation built by rhythm or the memory evoked by a rhyming word, is the art that makes experience meaningful and pregnant with human connection.”

For more information, contact Anderson at mranders@presby.edu.

“Resonance”

“Vision”

Written by Allison Cooke, a junior English major minoring in media studies, journalism track from Winnsboro, S.C.