Artstart's chairs like no others

<p>You can buy it for $39.99 at IKEA.com. It comes in your choice of birch, beech or pine.</p><p>It's about as plain as a chair comes. But its beauty lies in its stripped-to-the-bones simplicity. Like a blank canvas, it invites fanciful imaginings. And over the past seven years, it's become everything from a geisha to the Golden Gate Bridge.</p><p>Who knew that a basic dining room chair had such design potential?</p><p>Even the organizers of Artstart, which every year enlists professional and apprentice artists to reimagine this simple seat into a work of functional art, never anticipated the many amazing forms it would take.</p><p>Since Artstart began the chair project in 2003 to support its arts apprenticeship program, dozens of inexpensive IKEA chairs have undergone a transformation. They have been painted, quilted, turned into mosaics and had any number of materials and objects affixed to them. They've even been disassembled and remade into something only vaguely reminiscent of a chair.</p><p>Fetching $150 to $600 or more at auction, these “art chairs” have made their way into homes and offices throughout the North Bay and beyond. Some are used as fun furniture. Others are conversation pieces and three-dimensional art. This year's Artstart Party for Art featuring an auction of one-of-a-kind chairs — as well as mirrors, end tables, vinyl rugs and other functional art for the home — is at 7 p.m. tonight at Bennett Valley Senior Center in Santa Rosa.</p><p>“Not everybody has the wall space. There are only so many things you can hang,” Artstart executive director Cathy Kaufman said of the appeal. “I like the fact that an everyday object can have such complexity and beauty to it.”</p><p>Chairs have inspired designers since ancient times, says Mario Uribe, Artstart's artistic director, who has done a few of his own art chairs, including a supersized version this year.</p><p>“We think of a chair as a common object, but through the centuries chairs have been works of art,” he said. “There are incredible chairs going back to Egyptian times. There were chairs in Tutankhamen's tomb that were amazing, with shapes of animals and inlaid mother-of-pearl. People have always wanted furniture that was very special.”</p><p>Melissa Kelley has two Artstart chairs, both whimsical pieces selected and bid on by her daughter, Rici. An ocean-blue chair with a cutout of a killer whale, complete with cutout fin and waves on the sides, serves as a special spot for keeping school books and papers in the family room.</p><p>Another year, Rici picked a lavender fairy-princess chair with a pretty princess painted on the inner back and her handsome prince on the outer back; a little frog perches on the seat. Years later, that chair is still Rici's seat at the dining table.</p><p>Kelley was so enchanted by the cheer that the art chairs brought to her home that she commissioned Artstart to do a set of redwood patio chairs. Students Kristine Arson and Kim Bonum painted a different wild critter, from butterfly to banana slug, on each chair.</p><p>The painted chairs are a practical way, Kelley said, to introduce art into her environment, particularly in the backyard, where visitors never fail to exclaim over them.</p><p>Kathleen Ferrington has several Artstart chairs prominently displayed in her Santa Rosa home, including a treasure by late sculptor Daniel Oberti called “Coupled Oscillation.” The highly regarded artist who played with cosmic shapes remade the plain, straight-lined IKEA into a rocking chair with crooked cross-pieces, circles and spheres. The chairs are among the most eye-catching objects in a home she delights in filling with locally produced art.</p><p>As an early auction volunteer, she said she was astonished by how many forms a single chair could take. They were almost unbelievably transformed into “pieces of art that evoked the poetic and lyrical, the elegant and musical; chairs that were inspired by the refined parameters dictated by the science of physics to the unleashed, collective inclusiveness of a yard sale,” she said.</p><p>Paula Rector, a property manager and former board member of Santa Rosa High School's ArtQuest program, selected a quilted chair one year and wound up designing her bedroom around it. Done by Chandra Woodworth, a former Artstart apprentice and present staffer, the quilting coincidentally incorporated all of Rector's favorite colors.</p><p>“It's symmetrical with all kinds of wonderful sequins and patterns of fabrics and lots of colors,” Rector said. “My room is four shades of teal with off-white. The chair sitting against the wall on top of my wood floor, which also matches the legs of the chair, is just beautiful. I look at it every day. It's sitting as if it were a chair, next to the bed in a corner, but it is never sat upon. It's treated as a work of art.”</p><p>People can also commission Artstart to create a custom project. In addition to the redwood deck chairs, Kelley commissioned the apprentices to do a mosaiced mirror that was similar to one she had seen in a magazine. It wound up costing far less but was equally appealing, she said.</p><p>The beauty of a whimsical chair is that you can, if inspired, do one yourself. One of the auction items this year is a session with one of the program's professional artists. But you don't need to be even artistically inclined to create a fun chair of your own.</p><p>Kaufman said the IKEA chair is good to work with because it needs no sanding. If you're up to stripping and sanding, you can find a “canvas” at the thrift shop. Give it a base coat of gesso, a surface primer that makes it easier to paint on. Otherwise, the wood will soak up the paint. You can also use an inexpensive white base coat.</p><p>Pick up some paint samples — an acrylic-based one is good — then lay out your colors and decide first which ones work well. If you want to create a design, you can draw it out using a grid to keep it straight. But there are endless ways to go about your design, from stenciling to doodling to freehand drawing to actually applying pictures or flat objects collage-style. When you're done, apply several coats of varnish to protect it. Crafts stores like Michael's will have supplies and ideas.</p><p>“The main thing,” said Kaufman, “is to be creative and don't worry about it. And if you don't like it before you varnish, just re-gesso and start all over.”</p><p>You can reach Staff Writer Meg McConahey at meg.mcconahey@pressdemocrat.com.</p>