Drawing this relaxed-looking armchair set me off; whenever I’ve had the odd moment during the last week, I’ve looked around for a chair to draw.
At Frankie & Benny’s, I focused on the chair itself and omitted the surroundings, such as the table leg in front of it.
As has so often happens, I started at the top but didn’t appreciate that I’d need to draw at a slightly larger scale to accommodate the detail of the chair’s back, so it has turned out taller and narrower than it should be.
Every detail of Frankie & Benny’s has been chosen to evoke the atmosphere of a 1950s New York Italian American diner: furniture, fittings and cut-out metal lettering. The F&B logo is brush-lettering, similar to the Walt Disney signature of the same vintage.
In a local independent cafe, Rich & Fancy on Queen Street, Horbury, the lettering on the blackboard is hand-drawn, and the chair is less chic and cosmopolitan.
Pizza Express goes for a retro style that might have earned a Design Council label in the 1960s.
Back in the studio, I was at last able to study a chair which wasn’t partially obscured by a table, a customer or a waitress.
The folding Ikea chair gives me a better chance to observe the negative spaces between the tubular metal framework and the plastic seat and back: triangles and shapes that remind me of a wedge of cheese with the nose cut off.
You wouldn’t want to mess with this guy. As he’s one of two bronzed characters looking out from the kitchen in Frankie & Benny’s, I’m assuming that this must be Frankie.
In this 1950s ambience, I feel as if I’m being regressed under hypnosis. I have an impression that we were eating soup (cream of mushroom?) from white pyrex bowls somewhere towards the back of the long and airy coffee bar.