I’m an art therapist for chairs: I enjoy helping old chairs to express themselves through color and form by giving them a new coat of paint. Look underneath the seat of each chair to see what it said to me during its process of self-discovery.
I started painting needy chairs in 2004 after seeing a stunning example on a porch in North Carolina. Since then, my style has developed and become my own: I paint in very bright colors with designs ranging from the geometric to the representational to the abstract. I love finding old chairs with lots of turnings on the spindles (exactly the kind that Antiques Roadshow would jail me for refinishing), and giving each knob a different color--we humans aren’t perfectly symmetrical, so why should we expect a chair to be?
I find my orphaned chairs at junk shops, barn sales, and roadsides, and appreciate the occasional donation. I scrape and prime all my chairs, use several layers of paint, and put a tough clear coat on top. I work mostly with acrylic house paint, but am beginning to use environmentally-safe clay-based paints, as well. If you treat them as you’d like to be treated, then their new look should last a long time.
