Awhile back I posted about my friend Matthew Thompson, who has a wonderful carpentry business in New Orleans. Every now and then, he'll jot off a note with a picture of something he's working on and yesterday he did just that (see below).

I never cease to be amazed by what inspires him...

I have attached a picture of a set of wooden stadium seats that I just finished for a client who saw the ones in my house that I made many years ago. I remember as a little boy sitting in such seats at Hestand Stadium in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, watching the high school team play, somewhere around 1965. Originally, I copied these from the movie That's My Boy! starting Jerry Lewis and Dean Martin, a football movie in which the hapless Lewis becomes the best player on the team. The stadium scene shows thousands of these seats, I believe, and they made such an impression on me—the repetition of them—that I went out and made a set the next day at Jefferson County Mill, where I worked as a boy and a teenager. 

These very ones in the picture were made over the Christmas holidays, and I finished them about two weeks later, working intermittently on them. They are constructed from red heart pine that I have salvaged from demolitions around town. The detail is my own. I used a flat oil ochre color for the striping and borders and a flat black for the oval background. The numbers are a flat green oil that I found in the shop. The oval motif is copied from a Mississippi state highway sign, #604, that I saw outside of Pearlington, Mississippi, very early one morning, just as it was getting light. I admired its simple industrial marking. All that detail is covered with a deep walnut stain and sealed, a way to give it some depth.

Matthew