Egyptian Fantasy

Egyptian designs and motifs have inspired Artists for centuries, and this period of Art History was one of the first chosen for the Exotic Guitar Series.

When I play an acoustic guitar, I think of the basic sound that is common to all acoustic stringed instruments, and how it transcends time. The Egyptian Fantasy Guitar is based on an acoustic guitar whose classic shape was carved to match Egyptian icons.

Materials used were chosen to duplicate the colors of Egyptian Art: yellow maple, orange tulipwood, and turquoise and blue faience. The arched soundboard is carved to depict Cleopatra as a sphinx, with her head and back forming the left side of the guitar, and the snake she's committing suicide with, forming the right side. Archeologists now believe she used a cobra rather than an asp. The imagery is of extreme, sadness, a queen driven to suicide as her army is defeated, her husband killed, and she's about to suffer a humiliating execution in Rome.

The fretboard inlay follows her funeral barge heading up the Nile to the Pyramids and the setting sun. The imagery is completed at the head of the guitar with the truss rod cover as a ankh, the symbol of everlasting life, overshadowed by the Egyptian instrument of execution, the cobras, their eyes glowing with the light of amber thousands of years old. The guitar of the dead.