Our fine arts teacher Mr.Paulus recently submitted an entry into the Santa Maria Public Library’s 7th Annual Painted Chair Raffle. The chairs were painted and decorated based on the theme of a book of the artist’s choosing. Mr.Paulus decided to decorate his chair in the theme of the book “Animal Farm” by George Orwell. The chairs were on display at the mall where passers by could buy a raffle ticket an place it in the box next to the chair they hoped to win. All proceeds will provide books and materials for the Santa Maria Public Library.
“Last year Mrs. Curry talked her students into doing it with her students and this year she decided not to do that, so I decided to keep Pioneer in the loop and create a chair. I was talking to Mr.Feher about doing Animal Farm. It’s one of my favorite stories I’ve taught I in class, I’ve directed a play of it, I read it in college, and so I decided to use that as my story for the chair. Well it’s a painted chair and usually have just a picture painted on it. Mine kind of acts as a Frankenstein chair. It has paper mache, fur, there’s a whole lot of things on there. If You’re not familiar with the book “Animal Farm,” like a lot of people aren’t. It’s the kind of thing where the artist does 50% of the conversation and the reader or viewer does the other 50% of the conversation. So, if your conversation doesn’t include knowing what the book is about then you’re going to see it through just one way, but if you know what the book is about then you make more of a connection. The chair uses the animals in the story, it deals with socialism and the whole change that happened after WWII. And George Orwell created this allegory using animals, which is ironic because today we’re using the movies “Sing,” “Zootopia,” trying not to point fingers at ethnic groups, we’re using animals instead. So, the animals are getting treated poorly and so they decided to take over the farm and they kick the owner out. The animals tell the owner, we’re gonna do it our way and it’s gonna be great, it’s gonna work, it’s gonna be perfect. Then there’s a meeting between the animals and the humans and there isn’t a difference, you can’t tell the difference between the humans and the animals. We were working on a pig that also transforms into a human like form to show the similarities of the human and animal described in the book. And finally, the chair has little cowboy boots in the back and horse hooves in the front; and a little sheep that’s on the seat with fur around it for donkey hair and horse tails on the back and there’s feathers for the birds. I showed my students all the research I had to do even though I have read it, directed it, I still needed to find out all of the information on it before I got into it and I designed it about six times before I came up with the final thing. So it was a work in progress to show my students. It took me about a couple of months to completely finish it. To me there are two times when you stop doing art work 1) when it’s due and 2) when you sell it, otherwise you look at it and continue to work on it. In this case I had a chair, there was a deadline, I had some problems with it that I wanted to fix but I concluded that it was done.” -Mr.Paulus
