More yellow chairs

Yellow is becoming my new favourite colour. It's a far cry from my current love of gray. What could bring me to such a colour mood swing? It all began when I was working on one of my family history paintings posted several weeks ago. Then I saw van Gogh's famous yellow chair in an article about absence and presence as a theme in art, followed by Blue Sky Dreaming's painting which is an ode to van Gogh. I took this as a sign that I should explore yellow chairs a little more to see what was out there needing to be discovered. I've gone off on research forays for more trivia reasons than this. Join me on the yellow chair art journey. My findings were intriguing.


The Deco Detective has the most luscious yellow chairs in a range of styles. This design blog with an eco friendly mandate is a new find for me and one I will return to. Perfect bound is my favourite which is surprising given my need for clean, uncluttered lines in my home. I see it as an art piece, the pattern drove it over the top in the choice department.

Perfect Bound

Katy Elliott loves her chairs yellow too as she goes about renovating her newly purchased home. If you are wondering how prevalent yellow chairs are in furniture design, a Google Image search reveals that the design variations are mind blowing.

Moving away from furniture, I found Tales from the Yellow Chair which is "a live service design intervention". Anab Jain, an art student in London is exploring connections using technology as a lead in. I found this 8 minute video very fascinating on several levels. The isolation of big cities, how technology is changing our communication patterns, how we are skeptical about things we aren't familiar with, and much more came to mind as I watched it. The yellow chair is quite a calling card here. Get a cup of tea and have a look.

Not only van Gogh used the yellow chair as subject matter. Richard De Quattro placed a yellow chair in a very intriguing position.


Jeff Jensen's yellow chair is being eaten by six beetles while Lewis Miller uses a yellow chair to support his nude paintings. Then there's Gareth Lane's yellow chair that defies sitting and a yellow chair overlooking St. John's harbour thatis all about relaxing.

Not my cup of tea but Christie's price tells us they are pretty special if you are in a certain income bracket. I've named them "The Ends"

The chair in art

Lynda Lehmann brought my interest in chairs to the forefront with a recent post. One of the positive aspects of writing a blog and following other blogs is the stimulation and cross pollination of ideas. This post is a perfect example of this. I wouldn't be thinking about chairs today if I hadn't read Lynda's post.

There's a long history of chairs used as subject matter in art. Arthur Danto, Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University, wrote a thoughtful essay examining the use of the chair in artistic representation. He begins his discussion by focusing on a first century Buddhist carving of a chair placed below a tree and flanked by a group of alluring maidens who are sent to seduce the Buddha. Riders can be seen in the background. In this temptation scene, one never sees the Buddha, only an empty seat with a cushion is shown to symbolize his presence.

The second chair he speaks of is also empty. It is the unoccupied, rustic, yellow chair with a pipe resting on it that van Gogh painted in the late 1880's. The simplicity of the chair references van Gogh's "conspicuous humility". Danto refers to this work as "Self-portrait as chair". van Gogh's painting of Gauguin's chair around the same time was also unoccupied, but it was elaborate, authoritative and arrogant. If you would like to explore these two images further, this site provides visuals and an interesting commentary.

The final chair Danto explored is the electric chair Warhol used in 1967 in different formats. Danto describes it as an obscene and terrifying image and points out that it was an electric chair, not a flat bed or electric noose that the penologists came up with. Why a chair?

On Flickr, BillyRook questions artists' fascination with empty chairs. He decides that his interest is piqued only when the chair is out of place either spatially or temporally. It is this out-of-place-ness that raises interest and transforms this everyday object into a metaphor. I agree with this.

Jerseyside, NL 2006

Whenever I look at this photo I took several years ago while exploring my childhood haunts, it is a physical reminder of all the people who lived, worked and played in this area. The idea of a chair as a proxy for human presence is an intriguing one. There is presence and absence in this image. This duality is often explored in my work.