Four chairs. Four artists. Four surprises.

We gave four assemble-it-yourself corrugated cardboard chairs to four Tampa Bay area artists and issued this challenge:

Decorate the chair. Let your imagination run wild. No rules, no theme, no limits. Use whatever materials you like.

What started off as four identical, plain chairs evolved into four pieces of art that could hardly be more different. They reflect the concerns, personal and political, of their creators, as well as their very different artistic leanings.

Are they seats? Are they sculpture? Are they statements?

Yes.

- Text by Judy Stark, Times Homes editor

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This is the basic chair, made of triple-layered, 5/8-inch corrugated cardboard. It stands 34 inches tall, 35 inches wide and 26 inches deep and holds up to 1,000 pounds. It cost $35 from Mixed Nuts, available at www.crazycardboard.com, or call (615) 847-8399.

Name: Edgar Sanchez Cumbas, Tampa

Age: 30

His medium: Acrylics. Works part time doing graphic design, layout and image setting for Tampa Bay Digital Services.

Artist at work: Cumbas chose bright yellow for "its stark color. It's a color that's very welcoming at times. . . . When I'm painting I use a heavy texture of paint, and I thought about adding texture, but I was scared the surface might buckle and warp, and I really
liked the outside sturdiness of it. It was very structural, very heavy." Cumbas studied the flat pieces of the cardboard chair for about an hour before assembling it. Under the seat he painted a series of figures, "creatures and characters I've been working on for years that you'll see in my other work, lurking under the chair."

Chair chat: "I had to decide whether to do something decorative or to play with the psychic and human condition in a very satirical way. The idea evolved to paint the inside and take away the function of the chair and instead to deal with the psychic aspect of sitting on it and having creatures sitting under it, lurking like little cats. I wanted to play off the idea of having these figures under this massive structure. Do you sit on it and collapse on them, or does it hold up and these characters are safe in there in that environment? They're all sitting down or kneeling, so when you really look at it, it's a reflection of oneself, the viewer. When you look at it, you have to kneel or sit down to go under the chair to see it, and they're doing the same thing you're doing."

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The artist: Ludner Confident, St. Petersburg

Age: 52

His medium: Oils. Typical subject matter: nature, sports, music, life experiences, spirituality. He came to this country in 1975 from his native Haiti. He is an anesthesiologist at Bayfront Medical Center, but "all my life I've been an artist": music, painting, woodworking, ceramics, toymaking.

Artist at work: The title is "Spiritual Revival at Ground Zero," said the artist, gesturing toward the chair he painted with images of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center. He used acrylics, "not my medium," he said. "It was an experience." The chair's
base is ringed with the Manhattan skyline; the back and seat show the collapsing twin towers. Above the rubble, smoke and flame rise a firefighter's helmet -- "a symbol of the fallen ones" -- the American flag, the Statue of Liberty and an eagle -- "symbol of
vigilance and strength." In the dark clouds is the subtle "presence of the Divine Eye." Said Confident: "Freedom endures and will endure. We'll endure."

Chair chat: In the face of the Sept. 11 disaster, out of his own deep spirituality and intense Bible study, the artist asked: "How might God use me as a medium to express himself? What sort of message might that be? What God expects of us as his
children is humility, obedience, repentance and mutual love, and I think we found some of that in this event." He was inspired by Matthew 24:6: "Ye shall hear of wars and rumors of wars: see that ye be not troubled: for all these things must come to pass, but
the end is not yet." The scripture continues in verse 13: "He that shall endure unto the end, the same shall be saved." Confident said: "This message of hope I find very appropriate for these circumstances. If we accept that, we will find peace in the midst of
all this."

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The artist: MiMi Sayles-Cole, St. Petersburg

Age: 46

Her medium: Painted wood furniture. Recently she has started working with canvas, "which is really forgiving. Wood is not at all forgiving."

Artist at work: She cut the back of the chair with its regal crown from an additional piece of cardboard and added the tasseled "skirt" around the seat and arms "to soften it." The royal throne is painted in harlequin diamonds in four shades of latex house paint: purple, gold, dark green and lemongrass. Sayles-Cole made the accompanying scepter out of a wooden dowel, a finial, ribbon and jewels.

Chair chat: "I liked the contrast of the material with what I was going to produce" -- utilitarian cardboard transformed into a throne: "Royalty on a budget." She took "a lifeless cardboard chair and gave it a statement of boldness, injected with a sense of humor." It is also a reminder, said Sayles-Cole, the mother of a daughter, 19, and a son, 14, that "the greatest gift we can give our children is to set a model of their mother taking care of herself. I thought a throne was a good visual to remind women that it is important for women to meet their needs, much like a queen, even if it is from a cardboard throne."

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The artist: Monica Naugle of Plant City

Age: 41

Her medium: Naugle is a metal artist. She works and weaves it "all by hand, the old-fashioned way," then embroiders it with other metal. In the dining room of her home she displays a screen that mixes copper wire overlaid with grapevine gathered from
the swamp near her home.

Artist at work: She painted the chair in red, blue and yellow, the colors of the flag of her native land, Colombia. At a yard sale, a homeowner gave her a box of golf tees (he told her, "There are a lot of good moments represented in these tees"), which she sprayed red and glued to the chair to represent bullets. On the back and seat of the chair she outlined a map of Colombia in nail polish accented with red droplets that represent blood flowing from a body.

Chair chat: The chair "represents how I feel about my country," Naugle said. The country has long been a battleground for terrorist groups, and although "I never cared for political issues, it's getting so bad, it's affecting me," she said. She was detained and questioned recently at the airport while visiting Canada on her Colombian passport. The tragic events of Sept. 11 are "a little taste for the United States of what we go through," she said. "It was time to do something." The golf-tee bullets that ring the chair
"are to remind us of the number of people who die every day in Colombia. We forget that that's not supposed to happen. We become unaware of the pain of humanity's suffering. It's scary when people become desensitized. I should be talking about my country's natural resources, the best coffee in the world, its beauty, and be happy and proud. Instead there is violence. That's the image of my country to me."