Morning Dew

For the final artist guitar in The Art of the Guitar, artist Bridget Grady created Morning Dew, a one-of-a-kind playable painted acoustic inspired by the Morning Dew made famous through the Grateful Dead’s live performances.

Originally written by Canadian folk singer Bonnie Dobson and later embraced by the Dead, Morning Dew carries themes of loss, survival, and reflection after catastrophe. In the hands of the Grateful Dead, the song became something larger than music. It evolved into a meditation on fragility, beauty, and the strange tenderness of simply continuing on.

Rather than illustrating the song directly, Grady captures its emotional atmosphere. An enormous watchful eye fills the body of the guitar, suspended somewhere between sky and landscape. Dewdrops gather across the surface while roses bloom below. A lone skeleton figure appears quietly within the scene, echoing the song’s awareness of mortality while the surrounding landscape insists on life, growth, and renewal. The piece feels both surreal and deeply emotional, balancing darkness with beauty in a way that mirrors the music that inspired it.

Grady followed the Grateful Dead throughout the 1980s, creating posters, portraits, and drawings connected to the band and its music culture. Her work is now held in private collections around the world. Today, she is widely known for her paintings centered around animals, landscapes, and nature-inspired imagery that evolves intuitively through layers, erasure, and discovery during the process of making.

This original playable artwork will be available through the raffle during the opening night of The Art of the Guitar on May 29 at a mano Gallery.

Learn more about Bridget Grady and her work Bridgetgrady.com