RED CHAIR c. 1975-1980 Wood,tubular steel, enamel 33 1/2 17 18 1/2 Lynch Collection of Outsider Art, North Carolina Wesleyan College
BLUE THRONE c. 1980 Wood, nails, wax crayon, latex paint 35 1/2 X 26 X 28" Lynch Collection of Outsider Art, North Carolina Wesleyan College
to African culture through his mother or grandmother. Later in his artistic "career," after he got his first television in 1977,Person added the NBC peacock, cartoons, and probably documentary material on Africa to his iconography. He improvised a convincing decorative and symbolic code out of his schematic abstraction of personal tools, sawmill blades, images from the media, and indigenous North Carolina flora and fauna. The artist's surrogate, carved language not only imaginatively makes sense of God's natural order in rural eastern North Carolina, but also serves as Person's signature style. The styles of Person's chairs and thrones seem to be closely related to several antebellum armchair styles that either migrated from New England or were direct imports from England to the Roanoke River and Albemarle Sound areas of North Carolina where Person lived.' It is likely that Person was exposed to various styles of antique furniture at one time or another. Rail and spindle chairs with occasional fancy beaded turning or fancy finial patterns running across the top back slat developed as a local style and probably influenced aspects of Person's thrones. In the seating design of some of his larger chairs, Person cleverly adapted scalloped slats, which add continuity and unity to the allover carving found on the front and side plank stretcher aprons and hand-carved turnings. Also, some variety of the plankside chair style can be seen in the artist's hybrid plank and metal chairs made from junked tubular steel furniture. Viewing the carved detailing of the furniture's construction and styling is much like observing animation in wood. In free and playful imitation of lathe-turned furniture components, every hand-carved rung or finial has its own personality, not unlike the animated furniture in the Disney movie Fantasia. Hand-carved mortise-and-tenon construction and notching is more evident in the artist's earlier furniture, perhaps owing to his physical stamina. Every chair or throne not only provides a summation of detail, but also assumes character and unity through Person's improvised program of components, much like as in African tribal architecture and throne-making, where every wall-peak, asymmetrical adjustment, and carved life-form is significant in some way. Both irony and ESP seem to cross paths in Person's great "African thrones." It has been noted that the artist's name, Leroy Person, can be translated as "the king" or "royal person."4 Folklorist and art dealer Paul Bridgewater described his first encounter with one of Person's thrones as follows: He showed us a throne he was making in the back shed. It was elaborately carved with standards and lattices running in many directions. It was beautiful, complex and enchantingly lopsided. Yet even though it was far from being technically perfect it still possessed a regal quality that I am sure would have satisfied any of the African kings.'
FALL 1994 FOLK ART 49