A storm to sit on
Lucinda Breeding
Denton Record Chronicle - Sunday, September 18, 2005

The wooden chair was painted scarlet. Three tooth-like sculptures were strung in the
place where spindles would brace your back, dirty white and swinging in the dry, hot
breeze blowing at the Arts, Antiques and Autos Extravaganza.

“I love this chair,” I told my mother, who was visiting from Houston. My dad chose to
let the womenfolk shop the square. He decided to get ready for the Ohio State University v.
University of Texas football game in a much cooler RV.

There was something familiar about the chair, one of a handful hand painted by members of
the Visual Arts Society of Texas. The chairs were pulled from Denton Community Theatre
storage. The company was having a “garage sale” to raise some much-needed money.

I knew the second I saw the chair that Denton painter Deanna Wood had added her mark to
the inexpensive piece used in production sets. She joined painters Mike and Phaedra
Strecher, watercolorists Ingrid Winther Scobie and Jo Williams and painter Susan Whitmore
in “Chairs for Charity,” a project dreamed up by Bill Kirkley, an institution with the
community theater. The idea was to take some of the mismatched chairs in the theater’s
storage, have the artists paint them, and sell them for a scant $50.

I’ve liked Deanna Wood’s work since I saw her first painting, a cool study of the subject in a
recurring dream of the artist: tornadoes.

I’ve dreamed of tornadoes myself, great black funnels bearing down on the barn where I’m hiding.
Or sometimes, they turn out to be just benign slips of air, lifting just as they reach me. I’ve
dreamed that I’m playing board games with my sister in a Victorian mansion, only to look through
a window to see an army of tornadoes advancing on our hapless house. Game pieces start getting
dragged toward the funnels, windows break and furniture flies out the windows to be eaten by the
whirling clouds. Once, I dreamed I was walking through an airport, and I looked through the walls
of glass to see a huge tornado — 200 feet in circumference at least — spinning in place, following
me step for step through the concourse. No one else in the airport seemed to notice.

In interviews, Wood and I have talked about the possible meanings tornadoes might have in our
subconscious. They might mean we are coping with stress, feelings of foreboding or simple
disruptions that nag us in waking life. One thing is certain: We’ll see them again in some
other dream.

Wood has found different ways to paint tornadoes. In one three dimensional exhibit, she
made small funnel shapes, then hung them in spirals. The chair is a cousin of that installation,
and somehow, it makes me smile.

The little chair now sits in my guest room, a room all decked out in bright blue and the kind
of accent colors that would make Frida Kahlo smile. I like to think of the chair as a reminder
that those tornadoes in my dreams are mostly bluster. Never once has the storm conquered me.
I also like to think of the chair as a big-picture commentary about Denton Community Theatre,
a company that has weathered a storm this year, a storm that would have put a lesser entity
out of business. The company saw its executive director of 10 years resign, and is trying
to beat a limping economy.

It feels good to have an original piece of art in my home, one that is relevant to me personally.
It feels better that original art doesn’t have to cost thousands of dollars, which isn’t to say
that it’s never worth that much.

I haven’t sat in the chair yet. My cat has. She likes to play with the three little hanging funnels.
I like to look at it, and consider the scale of the storms. They make sense, and like the storms
in my dreams, they are manageable.

Thankfully, though, they can’t give chase.

LUCINDA BREEDING can be reached at 940-566-6877. Her e-mail address is cbreeding@dentonrc.com.