Musical Chairs

 Finishing my large painted Liberty Snakes brings my blog posts back to the present - almost.  There are some other projects not mentioned since the beginning of the spring lock downs and cancellations.  So to begin again, I return to March.

Our exhibition at the Bassett Gallery in Sumter, SC, had been closed down due to the pandemic.  I had wanted to include some three dimensional work with this exhibition on the theme of chairs.  My vision was to make a series of small chairs that were also musical instruments.  Since I cannot resist double meanings and cheap puns, I called these small chair-like rattles, whistles, and ocarinas “musical chairs.”  With no place to actually take these objects and market them, it seemed a bit frivolous to even think of creating these complex and time-consuming objects.  But I enjoyed the challenge and it gave me a much needed excuse to use up my excess clay.

The clay I used was my locally mined orange-hued Orangeburg material.  

There were some instabilities in this clay as well as some structural shortcomings due to my three year lapse in making clay sculpture.  But the clay that cracked or broke off made for another opportunity to use up excess supplies.

Typically I would just toss something that became damaged in the firing process.  But this time I chose three pieces that were only slightly damaged and repaired them in a way that enabled me to try something new using metal leaf, gesso, and oil paints.  

I first used epoxy to reattach fragments.  I then sanded everything smooth and applied marble dust gesso to the sculptures.  This I sanded the gesso to an egg shell finish and applied orange shellac.  The excess gesso went on a cache of panels that were brushed with shellac and then put aside for some time later.

In the process of repair,  my ceramic sculpture of a divan with a pillow regained its sound.  The pillow is a small flute and the divan itself a bass ocarina.  For the design I used bright colors and metallic paint.  

The obverse side depicts the narcissus then blooming in my garden.

For the rattle chair, I used metal leaf and oils.  The butterfly on the seat of the chair is one that I had espied on a flower during one of my walks in a then lonely and quiet city in early April.  

“The Chair Man Doesn’t Want to Hear it Anymore.”

The structure of the chair was derived from a handmade chair that I had seen earlier in the year at a specialty shop in Virginia, back when traveling was still an option.  It was the most bizarre chair I had every seen, made out of steer horns.  We were told that it hailed from the great state of Texas.  When I  had posted and image of this chair online, a friend observed that it looked like it was "sticking it's fingers in it's ears." By reproducing this in clay and adding a screaming face in the central panel, the sculpture brought this observation to fruition.  

My last painted chair was based upon my study of the chairs of ancient Egypt while at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in January.  The front side of the chair has mice hidden in the abstract design. 

 The obverse side sports a picture of a cat having caught a mouse - a design that I unearthed from an old collection of plates of Egyptian Painting.  My mothers had found these old black and white museum plates ages ago at a yard sale and I was happy to be able to use them as a resource.