Bert’s Market is home to a piece of functional art and Folly icon
by Miranda Steadman | Contributing Writer
Tucked inside the front door of Bert’s Market on Folly Beach is a purple piano painted with flowers, Alice in Wonderland characters, and the late great musician Tom Petty. Patrons will sometimes sit down and tickle the ivories while others just admire the artwork and appreciate it as a quirky piece of Folly lore. But where did it come from? Who is the artist behind the paintings on the piano?
Well, the story starts back in 2020, after a police officer murdered George Floyd in Minneapolis, MN. The story fueled outrage across a nation already on edge because of a global pandemic. Folly artist Jimmy O’Brien drew a touching tribute of Floyd on the chalkboard outside of Bert’s Market. The store’s owner, Omar Colon, appreciated his work so much that he asked O’Brien if he could look through his sketchbook.
Colon, who is also a musician, producer, and owner of Fairweather Studio, found a piece inspired by Tom Petty’s tune “Wildflowers.” In the song, Petty sang: “You belong among the wildflowers, you belong in a boat out at sea. Sail away, kill off the hours … You belong somewhere you feel free.”
To visualize these lyrics, O’Brien had painted Petty, who is from O’Brien’s hometown of Gainesville, FL, in a boat by the Morris Island Lighthouse dressed as Lewis Carroll’s character the Mad Hatter with the Cheshire cat from his classic 1865 children’s novel Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. It was also a nod to Petty’s 1985 classic, creepy music video for “Don’t Come Around Here No More,” which was a trippy reimagination of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.
Colon admired O’Brien’s work so much, especially that piece, that he commissioned the artist to paint a piano, which had been donated by Fox Music House, a local piano dealer located in North Charleston since 1928.
“Every adventure requires a first step …”
That’s a famous line from Carroll’s classic Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. O’Brien says his first step in this particular creative adventure was to burn incense and listen to Pink Floyd and Tom Petty as he began painting the piano. He recalls specifically playing Pink Floyd’s “Shine On You Crazy Diamond” and Petty’s “Wildflowers,” “Crawling Back To You,” and “Southern Accents.”
“‘Southern Accents’ is my home in song form,” says O’Brien. “With a lot of herbal influence, I just let it rip.”
O’Brien recruited friend and fellow artist Amy Ballew to help him paint many of the flowers on the colorful piano.
“She kept me inspired and she kept me motivated,” he says.
When O’Brien first moved to Charleston, he entered a mural competition at The Charleston Pour House and immersed himself in the local art scene.
“I have never been to a place with a more welcoming art scene,” O’Brien says.
O’Brien dabbled in live painting during shows at The Pour House to which he admitted, “I always feel weird [live painting], like I should be dancing or performing while I paint. People are probably like, look at this idiot… I’ll stick to painting at home.”
A huge fan of Petty’s music, O’Brien drew inspiration from the “Don’t Come Around Here No More” video in which Petty is dressed as Carroll’s Mad Hatter from Wonderland. Painted on one side of the piano is a white rabbit holding a teacup and standing beside a Salvador Dali-inspired melting clock surrounded by mushrooms. The other side features a frog holding a red balloon with Fox Music’s logo.
“Wherever the spirit moved me, and the wind blew me- that’s where I went,” O’Brien explains of his two-month-long creative process of painting the piano. “The project sparked my creativity for the next year.”
O’Brien currently lives back in his hometown of Gainesville, FL, with his daughter and son. But Folly Beach will always be a part of him.
“You can move away from Folly, but you can never fully leave it,” he says. “I’m honored to leave a piece of myself in the grand funky scheme of Bert’s. I’m happy to be just a small ingredient in that. From the bottom of my heart, I just want to thank Omar because he gave me the opportunity to do something lots of people have enjoyed and will continue to enjoy.”
