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.
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