Zulu coconut medallion on "Voodoo Blues" piano Ever since his first Mardi Gras, Lawson has felt a special affinity toward the Zulu Social Aid & Pleasure Club.

It wasn’t until the morning of Fat Tuesday that Lawson and his friend caught their first parade—Zulu. Beholding the rowdy burlesque of the face maskers in grass skirts, while in the throes of an extended acid trip, was, recalls Lawson, “pretty scary, not knowing that much about it.” But as luck would have it, the god who looks after tripping fools was smiling down on Lawson that day: A Zulu masker handed him a “Golden Nugget”—i.e., a Zulu coconut, the most fabled throw in all of Carnivaldom. Later on, after the last parade had passed, Lawson and his friend found themselves at the intersection of St. Charles Ave. and Napoleon Ave. Beneath a sun-drenched sky, Lawson recalls, Mardi Gras beads literally covered the street like a spangled carpet.

“It was the most visually explosive thing I’d ever seen in my entire life....That was when the visions first started happening.” It was, he adds, “such an amazing, intense arrangement of colors.”

The image became embedded, like a Jungian archetype, in Lawson’s psyche, though it wasn’t until years later that he began to translate his beaded flights of fancy into singular works of art.

Lawson never did graduate from LSU. Returning to England, he decided that painting landscapes, seascapes and cloudscapes was more to his liking than pursuing a career as a draftsman. His first exhibition, entitled Escapes, was at the Dunheved Gallery in Launceston, in the southwest county of Devon, in 1986. During this period, Lawson’s oil-on-canvas subjects reflected a concern with the transitory, ethereal quality of the natural world, and humanity’s precarious relationship to it. A subsequent show, at the New Street Gallery in Plymouth, was entitled Is There a Place that Haunts You?

By 1987, Lawson was ready for a change of scene. Drawn to the bucolic swamps between Baton Rouge and New Orleans, he relocated to Sunshine, a small fishing community in Eberville Parish where he lived rent-free, courtesy of friends who owned an old Mississippi River plantation property, and absorbed the ebb and flow of local life while working as a bartender at a picaresque joint called Miss Arlene’s Alligator Hilton Bar. In his spare time, he painted swampscapes and slices of Cajun life, among other subjects. He also executed mixed-media compositions that explored the interaction between the natural sciences of biology and geography, on the one hand, and technological products such as latex and neon on the other. Many of his initial works from this “bayou” period were included in a retrospective show at New Orleans’ Bienville Gallery, in December 1990.

By then he was living in Baton Rouge. Socking away money earned from odd jobs and sales of his work, Lawson was able to finance excursions to Guatemala and Mexico. Eventually, he lined up a job at a store in New Orleans that sold ethnic clothing and craft items. Before moving, he sold his van and used the proceeds to visit Indonesia, where he prospected for merchandise for the store and studied the art of shadow puppetry. 

In New Orleans, Lawson took up residence in an Uptown neighborhood on Magazine St. He’d been living there for about six months when an incident of shocking violence rocked him to the core.

One day, eleven-year-old Ivory Simms—who often dropped by store Lawson worked in to play musical instruments on display—was out on the street with a group of friends when members of a gang pulled up in a car. One of the occupants fired a hail of bullets from an automatic machine gun, killing Simms and injuring three others.

In memory of Simms—“a star athlete and a good student,” according to the New Orleans Times-Picayune—Lawson decided to paint a mural on the side of a local bar, the now-defunct Jackie’s II Lounge, where he’d been sitting when he heard the news about Simms. Depicting a set of hands reaching skyward toward a blue dove, the mural, entitled Love is the Message, One Day at a Time, represented a plea for harmony at a time when youth-on- youth violence had yet to become a burning issue in the city. Simms’s death, followed by other incidents of gun-related violence involving children, politicized Lawson. After finishing the mural, “I was still kind of disgusted with all these kids being killed,” he relates, “so I started making baby coffins.” The three-foot-long wooden constructions, with doors that opened out like a kitchen cupboard, were designed to be hung on walls.

Examples of John Lawson's baby coffins These wooden constructions, originally conceived as political statements against youth-on-youth violence, attained the status of chic novelty items.

In September 1996, a ground-breaking show, entitled Guns in the Hands of Artists, opened at the Positive Space Gallery in New Orleans. Brian Borrello, a politically active New Orleans artist, recruited 60 local artists to contribute works incorporating guns, or pieces of guns. The show, which included two of Lawson’s coffins and garnered extensive media coverage, was made possible in part by a local program whereby grocery vouchers and useful appliances could be exchanged for guns, which were then machined and rendered harmless. The following year, one of Lawson’s coffins appeared in The Art Exchange Show—which was billed as “an (alternative) alternative art fair”—in New York City.

Meanwhile, among hip collectors in New Orleans, the coffins attained the status of chic novelty items. But, says Lawson, “It just got so depressing, making baby coffins all the time. I just went kind of crazy over it.”

By 1996, Lawson was having trouble making ends meet. He wound up residing in a warehouse, with no heat or hot water, in a run-down neighborhood on Dryades St. “That was a miserable time in my life,” he confides.

Miserable, but not unproductive. A genuinely humble man who likes to work with his hands, Lawson busied himself carving designs on doors and working odd jobs in the carpentry and construction trades. Then along came an interesting artistic proposition in the form of an old upright piano.

The piano belonged to a friend, Pamela Cobb. She had accumulated a large stock of Mardi Gras beads. Why not try beading the paino?

Sketching designs onto the piano with colored pencils was the easy part. Lawson and Cobb then began the arduous, painstaking work of cutting up necklaces and affixing the beads with glue sticks—one bead at a time. After working off and on for several months, every square inch of the piano’s exterior, except for the keyboard, was covered with beads. Dominating one side was an image evocative of Mexico's Day of the Dead celebration: a skeleton emerging from flames and holding a cross. On the other side was a burning sacred heart. Emblazoned on the front, underneath the keyboard: a fallen angel. Lawson dubbed the labor of love Mardi Gras Mambo, the title of an anthem made famous in the late 1950s by a band, The Hawkettes, led by keyboardest and songwriter Art Neville.

When Lawson wasn’t hard at work snipping and gluing, he could often be found at the H&R Bar on Dryades St.—home base of one of the city’s most revered Mardi Gras Indian tribes, The Wild Magnolias.

Carrying on a folk tradition that dates back to the 1800s, Mardi Gras Indians are one of the true aesthetic and cultural wonders of New Orleans. For Mardi Gras, celebrants, typically from poor neighborhoods, spend countless hours making elaborately plumed, intricately beaded costumes, known as “suits,” which are reminiscent of the American Plains Indians and the beadwork of the Yoruba peoples of Nigeria. In Lawson’s opinion, Mardi Gras Indian finery, along with Mardi Gras parade floats, represent “some of the most incredible artwork in the United States.”

Lawson says he feels a close affinity to the Mardi Gras Indians, as well as another traditionally African-American Carnival institution—Zulu. “I’m the only white Indian in the city,” he chuckles.

One night, Lawson took some photos of Mardi Gras Mambo to the H&R. Examining them, Bo Dollis, chief of The Wild Magnolias, told the artist he was “blessed.” He also said, "This is beautiful, carry on doing it."

“It was a big deal for me,” says Lawson. “I mean, I didn’t want to feel like I was copying the Mardi Gras Indians and their work.”

Encouraged, Lawson successfully petitioned New Orleans' Contemporary Art Center to include Mardi Gras Mambo in a show. But unfortunately, Cobb didn’t feel she got enough credit as co-creator, causing some hard feelings. Later, while Lawson was spending time in upstate New York, the piano found its way to the Ugly Dog Saloon, at 401 Howard Ave., where it resides to this day. If any money changed hands, he never saw a dime of it.

Nevertheless, Lawson soon had his eye on another upright piano—this one owned by a woman named Oliva, who had a funky boutique on Magazine Street. When Lawson expressed interest in buying the piano, she reminded him of something he’d said several years earlier, long before he began work even gotten hold of the piano that became Mardi Gras Mambo.

Back then, there was a piano at the store just like the one Lawson was now looking to buy. He used to drop by to drink tea and listen to a man tickle the ivories on the old upright, known as a “barrelhouse” or “honky-tonk” piano in New Orleans. One day, Lawson walked up to the pianist and said, “Wouldn’t it be great to see one of these pianos beaded?”

Lawson paid Oliva $100 for the piano that became Temptation, a tribute to Tom Waits, who has a song by the same name. He beaded it as a commission for a bar in Baton Rouge whose owners had seen Mardi Gras Mambo.  (Ending up back in New Orleans, the piano is now on display at Barrister’s Gallery, at 1724 O.C. Haley Blvd., just down the street from the warehouse where Lawson once lived and had the studio where he beaded it.)

Lawson knew exactly what he wanted to do with the money he pocketed from Temptation: buy a baby grand piano to bead. He found one he liked at an auction house. Price: $900, plus a couple of pieces of his artwork.

Piano-lid portrait of the late James Booker Intricate and idiosyncratic, Lawson's beadwork shares a stylistic similarity to the music of this tragic genius.

The piano became a vehicle for Lawson’s interpretation of the music and life of James Booker, the idiosyncratic “Piano Prince of New Orleans” who died an early death in 1983. Having lost an eye, supposedly in a drug-related incident involving a syringe, Booker, also known as “Gonzo,” wore a trademark eye patch adorned with a silver star. His portrait appears on the lid of the piano, along with a large red spider—Lawson’s salute to a collection of songs performed by Booker entitled Spider on the Keys. Around the side of the piano is a swamp motif depicting a heron, flamingo and swan. When viewed from a distance, the tableau suggests a larger theme: a river of music meandering through the swamps and into the Crescent City, filling the air as stars fill the sky at night.

Laid into the beadwork above the keyboard is a rare James Booker doubloon, given to Lawson by a friend. (Eventually, the piano—dubbed Junco Partner, after Booker’s theme song—found an appropriate buyer: David Jernigan, an accomplished keyboardist who has worked with James Brown and Sheena Easton.) (next page)