A Seat at the Table: Chairs in the Wild

Exhibiting in Charleston at the Nina Liu and Friends Gallery brings back fond memories. Nina Liu often held exhibitions on specific themes: the trees, the angels, the hearts. As with most of these exhibitions, I would enthusiastically produce a body of work, sell about one eighth of it, and then bring home the rest for storage. Eventually I might sell a few more of these over the years, but there generally remained four or five painting that would refuse to leave home. The tree exhibition was no exception. I included in this exhibition some paintings of truncated trees that I had made in Holland. Three of these were somewhat intimidating, made even more so because I gave them titles like Tree of the Wicked Spring. I have not decided what to do with Wicked Spring yet, but two of the paintings of this trilogy have been re-purposed for the upcoming exhibition A Seat at the Table: The Chair as Aesthetic and Social Construct, at the newly designed venue, Artists Collective, Spartanburg.

The pale winter scene in Holland is now embellished with the mysterious presence of an ancient Egyptian chair in the background, and an overturned chair in the foreground. The former came from my studies at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, the latter from an old Charleston chair from our private collection. The painting is still haunting but a little less spare.

My painting, Truncated Trees, now has an addition of an African chair from the permanent collection of the local museum here in Orangeburg - the I.P. Stanback Museum. I needed a very strong structure as a focal point to balance those massive trees and the African chair seemed to suit. I liked the way the top piece was fashioned from a single branch.


Just one more or more two revised paintings to go before I start painting and drawing new compositions again.