A Chair as Art

I have been working on images of chairs. The chair, in all its various permutations, serves as a poignant symbol of the human condition. It can invite the guest in to the fold of company. The chair can validate a person’s sense of community belonging, as the expression "having a seat at the table," implies. Yet the chair constrains as well, with its subtle imperative not to rise but to "stay seated." A chair can even frighten or intimidate as a possible item to be bound to. An empty chair can serve as a reminder of solitude and loss in its haunting vacancy.

In order to create my art with chairs, I have started with documenting chairs that have a certain character. I found this chair on a porch of an abandoned home. There was this curious looking toy frog stashed under the seat.

Although my painting takes this subject from reality, I decided to paint it as an hallucination, naming it "Sit back and Let the Frog Inform Your Mind." The butterflies are painted from those found around the zinnias in my garden. As I painted, they became super-sized, as did the frog.

One small detail that most viewers would not notice is the small embryo at the tip of the frog’s tongue. I painted this after reading the news of neighboring southern states rolling back women’s constitutional rights to abortion. I never understood the logic behind the granting of greater civil rights to an embryo than to the fully grown person who carries it. Hence the strange hallucinatory, irrational quality of the painting.