While perambulating around the local area last month I encountered a chair left out on the curb with a white piece of cardboard that read free sitting prominently on it’s seat. It had not as yet been rained on and I immediately recognised that this possibly, was the studio chair I had been searching for without knowing it. Standing with affected disinterest so as not to attract attention from local pickers I took a picture to send to my two person interior design focus group who gave it grudging lukewarm approval.
Before power walking home to pick up the car. And then carrying it back through the house to my studio where it sat awkwardly in the middle of the room.
This attempt to bring a studio chair into my life has a pre-history. As an undergrad and in the years following I would often visit friends who were painters or producers of objects in their studios. Spaces that carried the full romantic mythos of the artists studio, laboratory, stage, cauldron or incubator, no matter how small or encrusted with paint and cluttered with materials. Central to these (sometime rooms, sometime high walled cubicles) was the Chair. In this piece of furniture you would sit back reflectively to consider work in progress often while smoking. The chair (or couch) while being as speckled with art materials as everything else was ideally an old sturdy armchair with arms big enough to balance an ashtray.
In the studios I started to ad hoc create for myself where the central business was writing or video or sound you were already seated in a chair as dictated by the logistics of desktop computing. Your material was behind a screen in front of you and from the viewpoint of an observer there was a distinct lack of atmosphere. You were essentially in what looked and felt like an office, whether at home or in any of the other temporary spaces I set up shop.
While this has always suited my work methods, I was I now fully realised unable to completely escape the pull of the romantic painterly studio chair ideal. To smoke next to my canvases while posed on an old couch like Monet.
Or to live inside an ever expanding studio as artwork in the mode of Kiefer in Sophie Fiennes 2011 film about studio as immersive never ending project.
While I am still sitting daily in a studio where interacting with screens or electronic instruments is the default activity there is now space enough for three “stations” for different modes. Visual work, focused writing or music. A fourth station is now the street find studio chair, positioned so as to gaze across at the other workspaces, mainly while eating lunch and thinking about very little. These stations represent the different mindsets required by different overlapping processes and if given the space it would be helpful to add another one for admin and online tasks.
Being able to sit “outside” them in the Chair while pandering to my classical artist’s practice fantasy also seems to have the effect of allowing ruminative breaks to be taken while not completely mentally or physically leaving the process (or the studio) while doing so. It has also been the reading chair I never knew I needed.
