This is my favorite chair. In more than fifty years I would think that I might have had some other more favorite chair, certainly one more comfortable. But no, no actual chair surpasses this great chair. My chair was old when I found it, bare wood soft like the hide of a velvety tree. It's joints were a little bit loose, not enough to make you feel you'd fall, just enough to let you feel its liveliness. I studied archetypal psychology from the seat of this chair and planned my performances, created my costumes. I ate dinner with Heather when it was just the two of us from this chair. I drank gin and tonic until I was stupid with self-pity when Steve took his respite from me on this chair. This chair traveled through the seventies with me, left Santa Rosa for Palo Alto when I graduated from school and moved back to Sonoma County again to the first Bodega house at the Creamery. It went with me to the second place downtown, in the old livery stable and stayed with me through the eighties and the first few years of the nineties. I so very sadly left it behind when Steve and I pared down for the move from our spacious Bodega studio to the tiny one in San Francisco. I still miss that chair. I'm awfully glad to have its picture.
Chair on Red is one of my earliest solo oil paintings, painted on thirty by forty inch rag paper. The texture of the oils on paper is very like the chair itself rich, warm, delicious. I had been working on the collaborative Bodega Paintings with Steve for a little over a year. Until Steve introduced me to his split figure approach to those paintings I did not dare to paint. I pegged myself a three-dimensional girl, with hands who knew a whole lot more about making this art than I'd ever be able to reckon. Having painted nearly twenty figures and all the above the figure images in those painting, I had by this time completely embraced oil painting. I yearned to see what my own painting might be like. The chair paintings precede the dog paintings which were painted directly on canvas. I had become used to painting on nice paper and hadn't yet the confidence to paint directly on canvas, that seemed something a league beyond me, sacred. I had learned to stretch canvas though as we were by then adhering our Bodega figures to canvas. I thought I could just try painting on paper pinned onto canvas, to get the feel of the giving canvas. Prior to this our paper had been pinned to the remarkably tasty paper surface of bare sheetrock.
We had a couple of stools and this chair for resting in the studio. This day it was standing on grass flooring near the big painting wall in the downstairs studio, fresh canvases behind it. It looked so good I needed to capture it like some iconic model, I took many photos of it from all over the studio. The photos weren't fast enough. A portrait worthy chair asked to be painted. I sketched it in pencil fearful that my mind might stray and disserve its shapeliness. I spent a long time looking and mixing up the perfect colors and had at it. Oh, my favorite chair, it takes my breath away.
(You may want to delete the following gratuitous paragraph. I just wanted to say it but think perhaps it I will regret it in no time at all.)
It's one of those many paintings that sit in a roll in storage. I can't figure why I haven't framed it and hung it right in front of my face yet. Geez, I'd really better get on it. I fucking love this painting.
