These two chairs sat on my terrace in all kinds of weather, including one of the heaviest snowfalls on record which totally buried them for a couple of weeks. The chair in the first sketch is one I'd picked up with two others (mistakenly destroyed while in storage) at an open air market for 5 euro, and it was impervious to snow and heat. Unfortunately when I left Italy, I left them behind but they remain famous for having been the first of a long and still continuing series of chair drawings and paintings.
The combination of graphite for darks and white pastel pencil for highlights works wonderfully well on the yellowish manila sketch paper. The horizontals of the chairs and the verticals of the railing were more intriguing to me than the landscape in the background which I barely suggested. Although geometric in nature, the chairs are perfect stand-ins for the human figure.
