To this end I added a chair, as well as a small cat, to a painting of a woman seated at a table. The chair is an historic one, based upon my studies of wooden chairs from ancient Egypt. The chair was part of the collections at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and I thought that its black and white starkness would play out well against the black and white cat. In order to understand the structure of this particular chair, I spent some time at the museum sketching it, adoring this ancient object more and more the longer I studied it.
The small painting of the man with the large black down jacket was completed many years ago at a museum in Germany. He was seated across from a small, uninspiring stool, but with an intriguing glimpse into a small alcove with a stained glass window.
I began my hunt for exotic chairs at the Ontario Museum of Art in Toronto and was not disappointed by what I found. The African art collection housed an elaborately carved beaded Yoruba throne chair. This made its way into the small painting, almost overshadowing everything, yet curiously having a relationship to the colors in the stained glass window towards the interior of the painting.
Lastly, a painting that I had made of an attic interior in a British cottage beckoned for a better chair. For this chair I looked no further than my own home, and an old oak office chair that I had carefully refinished with hours of sanding and applications of teng oil. I painted this from life directly into the painting.
