I have an artist friend, we’ll call her Kim, who is making a small but intense furniture collection for recreation.  Her furniture isn’t just colorful or eccentric.  You could call it vibrant or psychedelic or splashy…even kaleidoscopic but no matter what description you use, it’s downright weird.  In fact, she calls the collection Awkward and Garish.

The collection mostly consists of a few old chairs, which she wanders back alleys to find, and then she fixes ‘em up like only she can.  My favorite piece, and that which I think is most elegant, is her grandmother’s old rocking chair.  Kim covered up the gold design on the back of the chair and glued on paper with a myriad of bright colored circles on it and now it’s a happy accompaniment to her living room.  Nestled in the corner is a painted bright yellow chair with a red and purple plaid design streaking across it.  Then there’s the cloud chair, the frame of which is painted like a cloudy blue sky and stretched across the seat is brown fabric decorated with a circular pattern and glued to the back are two random pages from a book.

Some of Kim’s other small projects include a purse with a photo on it.  The purse is no longer with us due to Kim dumping an entire glass of whiskey and coke into it but it’s worth mentioning just for that tidbit.

Kim just completed a chandelier made from glass drinking bottles and a whole helluva lot of glue.  I think she’s actually been studying up on types of glue and their different strengths and have seen her scratching her head in the glue aisle in confused bewilderment on more than one occasion.  When you break the chandelier down piece by piece, it consists of a giant pickle jar, a few glass Crush bottles, a couple Pom Wonderful bottles and several bulbous Martinelli’s apple juice bottles that I like to refer to as “apple grenades.”  And in the middle is a wooden horse head painted bright red. 

One day I was supposed to meet Kim outside of her work after her shift was over.  I found her on the corner in front of Starbucks, standing next to an old wooden highchair.  We greeted each other and talked for a second before we started walking in the direction of her apartment.  I guess I thought someone had left the highchair there, for whatever reason I don’t know, but I didn’t expect my friend to pick it up and bring it with us.  But she did.  Knowing Kim, I wasn’t so surprised and knew she had some sort of magic fate in for the damned thing.  Later I heard about her trip up and down Milwaukee Avenue, ambling in and out of thrift stores, looking for items to enrich her electric highchair of death.  She was inspecting kitchen utensils and colanders in a shop and asked, “Do you carry anything more…sinister looking?”

 
Afterwards I was telling my boyfriend about how “Kim wanted to make a piñata-“but before I could complete the sentence my boyfriend said, “Chair?”  Yep.  A piñata chair.  So there you have it.  Awkward and Garish.

Now, I poke fun at Kim’s furniture a lot.  Sometimes I just really don’t know what to say to her when she shows me something with wooden legs on it and excitedly tells me her motley plan for the object.  But I really admire Kim and not just for her spirit or her drive.  I admire her for her bold creativity and within her apartment walls she has all the colorful inspiration she needs.