The face was easily recognizable, but the canvas was a tad unusual. As I rounded a corner in the furniture room at the auction house, Ol’ Blue Eyes was looking straight at me. At least the image in the painting looked like Sinatra.
His eyes, though, were not the color blue but black, and the entire painting was a mixture of navy, greens and yellows. The image had Sinatra’s thin face, his trademark hat, his shirt open at the neck with loose tie and his ready smile.
The face was painted on a wooden canvas on the back of a chair. I stopped. The chair sat there like a throne, its presence forbidding me to go any farther without examining it.
This wasn’t the first time I’d seen a chair with a face painted on it or one that was made for a special person. Once, I came across a chair at this same auction house with a portrait of a gray-haired man on a leather back. Another time, I came across the sweetest little chair with an inscription from a father or grandfather to a little boy named Richard.
Common folks and designers seem to put a lot of thought into making expressive chairs, as the one that resembled a rabbit, another made of animal bones and a wing chair made of faded Levi’s jeans fabric.
The Sinatra chair was built with some very interesting materials:
Its backside was made of license plates that had been painted a deep brown (one was a “California World’s Fair 39” plate).
Its wooden arms were decorated with bottle caps held in place with nails.
Combination lots hung from the underside of its arms. Two had dropped off, and an auction-house staffer had placed them on the red velvet seat of the chair.
Small circles and floral designs provided a decorative touch. The Sinatra image was framed in aluminum disks.
The maker’s name was painted in big letters on the backside, Jon Bok, an artist who obviously used found objects to create his works.
Googling, I found that Bok was a California folk artist but I could not find much more about him. You can listen to a short 2008 interview here where he tells a fascinating story about how he came to use recycled materials. He had become legally blind four years before, and since he couldn’t see, he began putting recycled materials together, he said. He did regain his sight.
Bok has created furniture for the House of Blues in various locations across the country and for some Hollywood celebrities, according to several sites.
