Beadnik: In David Chatt's hands, a laborious process leads to dazzling art

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Thursday, September 29, 2005

Beadnik: In David Chatt's hands, a laborious process leads to dazzling art

By SUSAN PHINNEY
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTER

David Chatt had been fired before, but when I. Magnin axed him for leaving work 10 minutes early, it hurt.

NOW SHOWING

DAVID CHATT: TWO HANDS, TWENTY YEARS AND A BILLION BEADS

WHAT: Art exhibit

WHEN: Today through Jan. 1, closed Mondays

WHERE: BellevueArts Museum,510 Bellevue Way N.E.

INFORMATION: 425-519-0770

ADMISSION: $7 adults;$5 seniors and students; children under 6, free

He hadn't been wild about being a tailor in the menswear department of this fashion emporium that closed in 1993, but he'd given it his all.

"I'm not stupid. I'm not lazy. Why can't I keep a job?" he pondered while he consoled himself by sewing beads -- art projects he'd always had on the side but never considered as a career.

"I took a look at my life and decided I wasn't meant to work for other people. They (I. Magnin) helped me along with my career decision," Chatt deadpans.

He'd been "messing around with beads," for several years, but in the mid-1980s, there was no history of beads as a fine art medium. Then friends suggested he see "The Ubiquitous Bead," a 1987 show at Bellevue Art Museum -- the largest bead show ever assembled in the Pacific Northwest according to P-I files.


	"Accordion Box," 2000

"That show put beads into a global context," Chatt says. While beads have long been embraced by other cultures throughout the world, our society had been brushing them off as a "kitchen table" craft. "I believed I could make something important out of the medium. I realized there was a place to go."

He began thinking of beadwork as a sculptural medium. Then a raise in rent threatened to interrupt his art. He wrote but didn't send his landlord a nasty letter. Instead he called and offered to help rejuvenate and maintain the building. He was hired, kept his apartment and worked for the owner repainting apartments in several buildings for the next five years.

The work was flexible and it paid the bills while he focused on his art and established himself as a bead artist -- an artist with an international reputation and a solo show opening today at Bellevue Arts Museum.

Chatt has been beading full time for the past 15 years, but his paint-and-fix skills haven't languished. Eleven years ago he met Ron Cole whom Chatt calls "my greatest patron and partner."

He helped Cole finish renovating his Seattle home, and they've continued to buy and restore older homes, turning them into multifamily dwellings that they rent. Their projects are like colorful gems scattered around Capitol Hill. One is painted coffee/violet/pumpkin and chartreuse. Now they're about to tackle a former church in Ballard that will become their next home and a studio for Chatt.


	"Confrontation in the Green Room," 2004

"My house is as important as my beads," Chatt says. "Bringing things together for a cohesive statement, making order out of chaos attracts me."

Early in his career, Chatt thought of beads as a fashion medium. He went back to school at Western Washington University and got a degree in fashion design. By the time he finished, he had discovered beads-as-fashion was too limiting.

Making a deliberate move away from fashion, he began making bead-covered vessels reminiscent of Native American bead baskets. Then he segued into narrative works such as "Confrontation in the Green Room," a piece 25-inches high depicting an ordinary man standing naked before a mirror. "He's a guy who's just a guy," Chatt explains. He's a little pudgy. He's got a lot of body hair -- beaded, of course. "Nobody ever portrays a hairy back for art," Chatt says. His fleshy-pink "Flab Bag" is a boiled down digestive tract, a mouth atop a knobby pink glob.

Beading is a long, slow process and the artist admits he watches too much TV as he works, but it's sometimes an inspiration. His "White Men in Suits" is just one example of social commentary that's crept into his art.


	"Caribbean Vessel," 1992

"If you watch (TV) long enough you discover the mischief caused by white men in suits," he says. This piece features a corporate ladder, one man on top, another climbing, another falling off. The Enron debacle comes to mind.

Michael Monroe, director of Bellevue Arts Museum, says Chatt "represents a small handful of people in this country who have helped elevate this medium to an art form." Ten years ago a solo show by a bead artist would have been rare. He compares Chatt to an impressionist painter, creating intensely colorful and luminous objects in three dimensions. "They seem to generate their own interior light," Monroe says.

Seattle art consultant Leslie Campbell has known Chatt since he was a child hanging around his parent's booth at art fairs. His father, Orville, is a jewelry artist and former head of the art department at Skagit Valley College. The family lived in Sedro-Woolley.

Campbell says she became aware of his work about 15 years ago. "He's considered a glassworker because the beads he uses are glass. I've watched his work evolve. He was an innovator. There wasn't anything to compare him to. He's among five or six people internationally doing this kind of beadwork. He put his head down and made this an art form. Professionally, I think he's a model for an artist who really wants to succeed."


	"Toast Purse & Strawberry Ring From Breakfast Set," 2004, is on display in David Chatt's exhibit at Bellevue Arts Museum.

Earlier this month he was working on a satin bustier inspired by the Janet Jackson "wardrobe malfunction" at the 2004 Super Bowl. To Chatt, it was basically a flap about polka dots. So his bustier is encrusted with "nippleage" -- exquisitely beaded on flesh-toned satin. The nipples are in assorted sizes, shapes, colors. From a distance, they are simply, polka dots.

These pieces take weeks, or longer, to assemble and although they may sell for $2,000 to $20,000, he says he works for "convenience store wages." He also has income from teaching, when he's willing to teach. He's taught at Haystack in Maine and Penland School of Crafts in North Carolina. "Those are great places to go for wonderful exchanges with other artheads," Chatt says. "You get to show your work and see the works of others. It's a great environment."

Sharon Campbell (not related to Leslie) appreciates the humor in Chatt's creations. Sharon is the jewelry curator at Pacini Lubel gallery in Seattle where his work is featured, and a member of the jewelry acquisitions committee at Tacoma Art Museum.

"David makes these little scenes that are just hysterical. He has a definite whimsical sense," she says. "He's made a puzzle box with 16 little slots. Pull a ribbon and it creates a puzzle. Turn the pieces over and it makes another puzzle. You wonder how he comes up with these concepts."

Chatt says he believes in engaging everybody. "I believe in art for the masses. Art should be intellectual, but not deliberately intimidating," he says. That's one reason he works with beads. "They're instantly seductive from a visual and tactile standpoint. They're alluring. You can pull people in and they can participate in the message.

"That's when I feel my medium is at its best."

More headlines and info from Bellevue.