MANSFIELD, Ohio — Ken Arthur infuses human qualities into his artisitc creations.
He finds rusted tools, skulls, nails, drift wood, pine cones, buckeyes, bolts, pianos, masks, rocks — anything that makes his right brain tick. And then he makes art that is familiar to the human eye.
His latest project is a collaboration with artists from Mansfield and around Richland County. He calls it the Piano Man Project.
It all started when a friend of his called him up to tell him about a “destroyed baby Grand” he was throwing away. Arthur took it, tinkered around with it and realized its parts, when arranged a certain way, resembled a human. The Piano Man was born.
Each piano Arthur salvaged gleaned him 44 piano men, which he then confined to a wooden box with a glass front– its own display case. To make the project collaborative, he gave away two cases to a friend. The friend fashioned the piano man boxes in any way he wanted and Arthur kept the one he liked most.
That was around 10 years ago and the project is ongoing; since then Arthur handed out these piano man boxes all around the county and he showed them in various art shows. He keeps around 100 of them currently in one (out of three) of his two-story grain silos on his property near Lucas. He usesh is silos to store most of his finished artwork.
Over the years he’s taken the piano man boxes to three shows — one at the Mansfield Art Center, one in Cleveland, and another in Ashland. He plans on displaying the nearly 100 piano man boxes in an art show in Tiffin next year.
Arthur works as a building official electrical inspector for six counties for a day job. When he isn’t clocked in at work, however, he’s either in his shop or on the prowl for other materials for potential art pieces.
He estimates that he’s torn down 50 barns. Many of the items he uses in his artwork comes from salvaging those items.
His artwork consists of … everything. “Winter Count” consists of three large panels with three rows of five individual boxes. Inside the boxes is detritus he finds in his hunting and gathering ventures — natural and unnatural. Each box contains a hammer in the foreground, symbolizing familiarity.
The idea was to conceptualize a Native American tradition in which individuals painted pictures of significant life events onto a canvas, each picture represented their age. So instead of keeping track of a birthday, their age was depicted by pictures of certain life events.
“I set out to make a box each day for forty days. At the end though, I made more because it didn’t feel finished. I have 68 in all,” said Arthur.
His favorite project, however, is the Mask/Not Mask. The idea was to collect African masks and compare them to everyday objects he found.
“We can see faces in everything. It’s a survival technique, you know? We had to recognize our own to survive, he said.
Maybe that’s what makes the piano men so intriguing: their human features and qualities. Each piano man is an individual, just like you and me. When Arthur hands over one of his base piano men, he tells their creators to “do whatever you want with them.”
“There are no rules,” he said. “The project is about collaboration and what other people come up with.”
In the future he hopes to have a book written. The book, he said, ideally will contain each piano man’s story explaining the artist’s inspiration. However, there is no end number of piano men in sight.
“I don’t know what the end number would be. I guess when it would take too much time,” he said with a laugh. “It’s not a money maker.
“I’m just trying to make people a little more aware, you know? Instead of just walking through day-to-day, stop and look at the beauty of things,” he said. “When you go to find a four-leaf clover, you don’t look for a four-leaf clover. You look for a non three-leaf clover.”
“Maybe that’s what makes the piano men so intriguing: their human features and qualities. Each piano man is an individual, just like you and me,” said Ken Arthur.
