A Seat at the Table: The Red Thread Gets Reinvented

This little square painting used to house just a solitary man squatting on the floor and looking out at the viewer with a quizzical expression. His home was a mass of wild and wooly red lines. The painting was originally completed for the poem, The Red Thread, from my poetry book manuscript recently given the new title of A Rendering of Soliloquies. (The new title seems to lend itself to typos so I have some minor regrets about this update. It almost went off to the last publisher with a glaring spelling mistake right there front and center in the title - not the best way to make a first impression).

My second update was in the painting itself. With the addition of a chair, the painting will now serve a double duty. The chair entered because this will now be used for the upcoming exhibition in Spartanburg in January 2020: A Seat at the Table: The Chair as Aesthetic and Social Construct.

This particular chair was patterned after a late eighteenth century mahogany American armchair that I had sketched from life at the National Gallery.  Including this chair from the days of our founding fathers served as a good contrast, with its orderly, rational and upright form, to the chaos of swirling red lines in the squatting man’s environment.

Early American chairs had symmetrical structures formed around a centerpiece called a spat. The spat was carved into decorative designs that often depicted charming and harmonious musical instruments like harps or lyres. For this chair I made a design where the spat should be that is in the shape of an American dollar sign. This dollar sign crept into the work as a product of present concerns and recent reading.

I had just finished reading Thomas Pikkety’s Capitalism in the Twenty-First Century, a brilliant work that encompassed more than two hundred years of economic trends. In a carefully researched analysis, this 750 page tome tackled the question of why societies tend towards wealth inequalities and proposed some solutions to prevent this from becoming so extreme as to be socially destabilizing. At the same time, I had been ruminating on tackling a complicated and prickly financial transaction. As a result, the dollar sign in the chair has shifted from where it should be as a center spat, and has moved rightward. Something to ponder!