Living in a renovated firehouse in San Francisco, John Dickinson worked from the 1960s into the 1980s, creating offbeat furniture from unusual or unexpected materials such as white plaster and galvanized metal. Dickinson treated each material as if it were precious. This chair is made of heavily carved wood covered with gesso—a water-based, heavily pigmented white primer frequently used for sealing porous wood before applying paint. Remarking on this chair’s startling animal legs and paw feet, Dickinson said, “The Regency or Egyptian influence was not in my mind. I was after something mock primitive.” While most designers would refine the primitive “beyond recognition,” Dickinson preferred to take the opposite tack in order to “end up with something very peculiar looking but something quite successful.”