It's Not Wood—
It's Leather
Chris Chapman has carried trompe l'oeil effects to new heights in Western Furniture.

by Chase Reynolds Ewald
 
Chris Chapman sews as she talks. Tonight the curtain will open on her daughter’s school play, in tiny Carbondale, Colo., and she has spent countless hours immersed in the costumery of early 17th-century England. Rather than working on her own business, she is producing peasant-sleeved shirts, leather jerkins, and fancy women’s dresses with brocades and twisted cording. She is applying trims and creating whole costumes for all classes, from humble shoemaker to king and queen. Her reimbursement will be the pleasure she gets from researching and the joy of watching the children assume characters while learning about history. How does the school feel about having one of the top Western designers in the country giving up several weeks of her time for this historically correct venture? “They sure do appreciate it,” she says in classic understatement.

But Chapman insists she is the one deriving the most benefit from it. After all, though she is known for her extraor-dinary leather furniture—and a proprietary technique that makes the leather look like carved wood—she started her career in historical reproductions.

Chapman was given her first sewing machine at age 5 by her grandfather, and took up beadwork as a youngster. She already was an established leatherworker when in 1974 she saw her first Indian and mountain man clothing at a Western rendezvous. “It changed me,” she says. “I made a conscious decision to study Native American clothing in detail. Right away I started making things that were historically accurate.”

Her studies took her west to rendezvous and powwows—because that’s where the inspiration was—and east to the hills of Missouri and Kentucky, “because that’s where the wealth of the American gun collecting movement was. The more I did, the more I got into it, and the more I studied, the further back in time I went. I studied Plains Indian and Woodland Indian styles and Northwest Coast Indian art. I started producing a series of artifacts with Northwestern designs, [but] then someone would say, ‘I want an Arapaho dress,’ and I’d immerse myself in that. The request from the customer often prompted the direction of the next phase of research. I just taught myself.”

From quill work to beadwork, from pre-Revolutionary War clothing and fur trader’s outfits to shooting pouches, Chapman’s research exposed her to as many pieces as could be found in books and museums. In 1991, she started applying her 30 years’ experience in leatherwork to furniture design.

She wasn’t the first to apply leather to wooden frames, but, as she says, “Everything else I’d seen has been poorly done, because the maker’s only reference had been saddle making. I didn’t come from a saddle making background. I had been doing leatherwork for 30 years, been sewing since I was 5, and been an artist my whole life. The historical research and reproduction work I’d been doing went all the way back to 16th-century European leatherwork, so I had a historical frame of reference. I’d gotten in to lots of private collections and museums, and I’d seen so many different styles and ways of putting things together. When I started making furniture, everything I had learned before came together.”

Chapman’s pieces have a warm, comforting presence, with all the texture of a well-worn saddle, as well as a patina that conveys the impression of both age and loving use. Close inspection reveals intricate surface tooling. Decoration and shading bring out the form of the piece and the designs worked into the leather. What’s most unusual about Chapman’s work is that the leather is actually shaped or sculpted rather than simply wrapped around a wooden form and decorated.

“I didn’t want my things to look just like another saddle. I wanted to take leather as an art medium and a sculptural medium and see what I could do with it,” she says. “The high-relief technique I’ve invented is like sculpting from underneath. It’s similar to repoussé metalwork. Sometimes it’s layers of leather, literally carved and sculpted and shaped, then overlaid with another piece of leather, which is worked to pull out the detail.”

Her entry in the 1998 Western Design Conference, which won Best of Show, was a king-sized bed with 7-foot headboard, bearing hand-forged iron crosses at the center of the head- and footboards. For this piece, she developed a decorative border trim that simulated Spanish chip carving in a raised pattern. Her most recent project is a wraparound bar with a central panel featuring a sculpted bull elk descending from a forest to sagebrush foothills. The side panels take the sagebrush as inspiration for a border motif. “It’s got that look that I do,” she explains. “It’s Western, but it’s got a European flair to it.”

Chapman’s plans for the next few years include the development of a line of manufactured pieces, starting with mirrors and tables, and she expects to relocate her business, Chapman Design, to Montana eventually, so that she can keep her horse, Bob, on her own property rather than down the road from her Roaring Fork Valley home. Nature is her biggest inspiration, and has been since her childhood spent in the Minnesota woods. “One of my favorite places in the whole world is Yellowstone National Park,” she says. “I love the idea of being able to go to Yellowstone Park on a Sunday afternoon and photograph wolves and buffalo.”

There she will undoubtedly be inspired to build furniture meant to last for generations.
“I try to build things that will be just as appealing 100 years from now,” she says. “The kind of person who buys my things isn’t buying because it’s a trend but because they want this piece for their grandchildren.”