A Seat at the Table, Drawing Two: The Roebling Chair

A Seat at the Table: The Chair as Aesthetic and Social Construct

Drawing Number Two: Puppets  Charcoal and pastel on paper

The recently completed drawing above began as a poorly executed study of a male model reclining on a settee. This drawing remained in a storage portfolio literally for decades. For the most part this was due to my frugality and not wanting to discard a perfectly good piece of high quality drawing paper. I was also somewhat intrigued by the possibility of some day reinventing this foreshortened figure.

An exhibition opportunity, scheduled for January, 2020, in Spartanburg, called this drawing back out of retirement. Because this exhibition is based upon the theme of chairs, the first change I made in the composition was to turn the settee into a large chair. My source of inspiration was no ordinary chair, however. I reinterpreted a special chair that my father had stored in his basement, which then made its way some time later to a sibling's attic.

It was the chair I knew as the Roebling chair.  The manufacturer, according to my brother's research was the early Morris company.  This particular chair was a fancy version of this recliner, replete with carved lion's heads.  The  story I was originally told, which may or may not be apocryphal, was that this chair was commissioned either by or for the young Augustus Roebling. He was returning from London and the chair was to be a comfortable place of respite for him in his New York home. Unfortunately, Augustus never made it back to New York, because the ship he boarded in London was the fateful Titanic! 

The story of how my father came to acquire this chair was a little murky, but seemed to involve a partial payment from one of his clients. My mother was always a little frightened of this chair, and I must confess that some of that trepidation rubbed off on my psyche as well. It was an unspoken feeling between us that the chair was somehow bad karma. Keeping it might entice the ghost of Augustus to come and sit in it. I have to laugh at myself here to have also been so affected because if I were to rate my level of mysticism and spirituality on a scale of one to ten, it might be about .5. Yet such is the power of the history that an object carries, with or without actual ghosts.

In changing what was originally bed- like in to something more chair -like, the figure was immediately dwarfed. Oddly, the figure seemed to change gender as well. Then she lost her personhood and became merely a puppet, with strings attached. I added another little puppet in the background as well, so that the scene took on an aura of a backstage event. Then things got a little eerie as I changed the open mouthed lion heads originally on the Roebling chair into hands - hands pleading for rescue from the frigid sea? It is indeed haunting.

Another curious addition to the drawing is the shoe, obviously too large for the puppet on the chair. I often think bilingually when using imagery and the shoe is no exception. For in Chinese, one of my adopted languages, the word for shoe is a homophone for the word for disaster.  Yet is also a homophone for harmony and rhymes, as well as slanting and being in the company of someone or something else.  Changing the tone, xie for shoe can also mean a place of rest - a rest that poor Augustus would never find in this chair.

Transformations and Translations: Rising Heart

I. P. Stanback Museum
Transformations and Translations: The Art of Una Kim and Janet Kozachek, Part 2
On view August 11 - September 30, 2019
Meet the Artists September 19, 5:30 - 7PM
The Mixed Media Work, Rising Heart

There are art works that are intentional, and others in which one simply applies intent on to an accidental finding.  Much of my work falls in to the latter category.  When I worked with found object mosaic assemblage, it was the object itself that was re-purposed into art. In recent years, due to space limitations, I often borrow objects that inspire art work .  Or in the case of the art work Rising Heart, find something, then give it away.

The mixed media work, Rising Heart, previously labeled Soaring, was the result of finding a peculiar piece of wood on my walk in a nearby park.  The piece of wood appeared to be a knot that had fallen off a tree.  I took the peculiarly shaped knot and placed it on a rock.  It bore an uncanny resemblance to a bird with its’ head tossed back and wings extended.  I took some photos then brought it back home to show my husband.

     “Why didn’t you just bring the piece back home?”  He asked.  I mumbled something about feeling that I was unworthy of it because it looked like something ethereal.  Fortunately, my husband convinced me to bring the piece back in order to study it more carefully.  I did and set the piece up in my sun room/photo studio to take some interesting shots.  These shots are of either side of the piece positioned on a rock.  I posted the photos on Facebook and they caught the attention of another artist, Tyrone Geter, who expressed interest in having this object after I finished with it.  I agreed, which meant now I had to do something with it before giving it up. 

I was inspired to paint loosely, with splattered ink and spontaneously rendered spots of oil pastels.  The bird in the painting rose off the rock, as if flying.  So I named it Soaring.  I then packed the wooden knot up and shipped it off to Tyrone, who claimed that there was something almost frightening about the intense look of this crying bird. 

I did not find the wooden knot frightening but felt something poignant and sad about the hole in its center, a hole that I retained in my drawing because it seemed a necessary part of this piece - the hollow in one’s heart.  Did it signify loss?  Freedom?  It did strike me at one point as being like a Buddhist relinquishing of earthly desires.  Yet despite this, I eventually did decide to fill that empty void in the bird’s chest.  I filled it with a stamped design after listening to an interview of a student activist survivor of the Tian An Men massacre of thirty years ago. 

For weeks I had been fearing this anniversary.  I recalled the anxiety I felt all those years ago as the students gathered in Tian An Men square in 1989.  I was in graduate school at the time at Parsons School of Design.  But I had come to New York from a previous life in the People’s Republic of China, where I had completed several years of study in Chinese art and language, two of those years at the Beijing Central Academy of Fine Art.  In 1989, the large Goddess of Democracy that was wheeling about the square, had been created by the sculpture department of that school.   
The terrible, bloody crackdown that followed the protests made me fear for the lives of people I might have known.  On television, I thought I saw two people I recognized, running away from bullets!  Two years later, after returning to China, and to my old alma mater, I did come across those two - they had survived!  My professors had survived as well.  And many of the students who I knew may have survived as well, since I knew them back in 1985.  But I will never know for certain and it always remained a hollow in my heart, as did the fact that in the early 1990's the old CAFA on Wang Fu Jing street was torn down and moved to a place on the outskirts of Beijing.  That remained something of a sentimental void as well - no old haunt to go back to - that scrappy old place around the corner from the Beijing Opera School.   Today, if you look on their website, of course there is no mention of the old location and of course no mention of the school’s involvement in the uprising of 1989 - it feels like a hole torn out of cultural and personal history.

It is 2019, and all those old activists of 1989 looked so much older in their interviews, which made me feel my age as well.  But there was one thing that an aged protester said in her interview that somehow gave me hope.  When asked if the risks and sacrifices made so many years ago were worth it, she replied “Yes.”  After hearing this,  I took up my carving tools and carved a little stamp out of soft linoleum.  I put red ink on it and stamped it onto the hollow space in the bird’s chest in my drawing.  It reads “heart.”