Drawing Chairs in Iran

Since 2003 when I made my very first trip to the Middle East (Jordan, Syria, and Egypt), I have been drawing chairs in most of the hotel rooms I’ve occupied. And there have been quite a few.

I love to draw chairs for several reasons: drawing them helps me practice perspective, grounds me in the here and now (this city, this hotel room, this chair), and later helps me remember where I was and what the room looked like. I also take photos of the room and the view from the window. More grounding I suspect. And probably chronicling too.

I draw the chairs in permanent ink on little 7 x 5 pieces of paper. I carry a small bag of colored pencils, along with pens and paper. Once I’m done drawing, I use the pencils to color in the chair, just as if I were at work on a coloring book when I was young. I even try to stay inside the lines. Shadows have been interesting to me lately and I’ve been trying different ways of executing them.

I've taped the drawings into my journal which was actually, before I altered it, a book entitled Oriental Rugs Today by Emmett Eiland, a rug dealer in Berkeley, CA. So what you are seeing as the background of some of the chairs are the rugs pictured in the book. Nice, don't you think, given that I was in Iran and all.

So here they are, my chairs from Iran.

 Tehran                                                        

Hamadan

 Zanjan

Tabriz

Mashhad

Shiraz

Yazd

Esfahan