Drawing Chairs

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.

 

Frankie

frankieYou 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.

He’s part of the late 1940s, early 1950s New York Italian decorative scheme. The retro soundtrack at breakfast-time (we shared maple syrup pancakes with bacon) includes Tell Laura I Love Her. The music pulls a thread in my memory. I can picture myself in a coffee bar in Carlisle on a family holiday to Scotland and the Lake District, aged nine, in 1960, listening to the Ricky Valance version, which was number one in the singles chart for three weeks.

carlisle 1960In 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.