By Daniel Hartill,Staff Writer

What: Chair-ity’ Auction for Androscoggin Children’s Advocacy Center

When: 7:30 p.m. Friday, Aug. 5

Where: Martindale Country Club, Beech Hill Road, Auburn

Tickets: $25 per person, $40 per couple for dinner and entertainment

Call: 784-0436

Chairs have been displayed at Lewiston-Auburn College

Painting with air
Lewiston artist Rik Belanger contributes to chair auction

LEWISTON – Even after his art appears in a gallery, Rik Belanger contemplates changes and apologizes for problems no one else sees.

“I didn’t have time to finish,” Belanger says, gazing at an intricately decorated chair on an exhibit platform.

It sure looks done.

Belanger’s chair, a child-sized Adirondack, looks like a souvenir from a safari.

On the back, three wooden panels sport the images of African archetypes: a giraffe, an elephant and a zebra against a sky-blue background.

The chair legs resemble bamboo, painted a light shade of brown with shadings to suggest a bamboo tree’s segmented structure. Across the seat, images of bright green leaves sit haphazardly, decorated with ladybugs.

Even the back is decorated with the bamboo look and sports the name “Jungle Adven-chair.”

Belanger, however, worries about the bottom of the chair, unseen as long as it sits on the floor. The bottom is blank, but for the primer coat of paint.

“I could do more,” he says.

However, no child will ever notice the so-called “unfinished” bits, nor will the chair’s buyer.

Dozens of chairs

This chair and dozens more for children are to be sold Friday in a charity auction to raise money for the Androscoggin Children’s Advocacy Center. The group gathers people from a variety of agencies to help kids who have been abused.

A father of four, Belanger figured he could help. He spent years working in Los Angeles, decorating the Knott’s Berry Farm theme park. He currently works in Brunswick, teaching commercial art at Maine Vocational Region 10.

He teaches teenagers to paint with an airbrush, the same tool he uses in his own work.

He uses it because it’s fast.

“I don’t have the patience to use a traditional brush,” he says. He can paint quickly, opening the nozzle and increasing the feed. It dries almost instantly. It must be precise, though.

Airbrushed colors have a transparency about them. Colors mix. Paint over a yellow surface with blue paint and the result is green. And there can be no penciled lines to guide the brush. The guidelines would show through.

The results can be eye-catching.

“It creates an almost photo-realistic look,” says Belanger. In fact, he used photos of African animals to come up with the faces on his chair. He picked the giraffe, elephant and zebra because almost every child knows them.

They even have their own animal crackers.

But Belanger would still like more. Examining the chair, he sees a patch of artfully decorated space on the leg. Boring, he thinks.

“Perhaps I could paint a tree frog there,” he says.