The Chess Art Thread

Keith Halonen  "The Pope's Little Two-Mover"

"The Pope's Big Two-Mover"

I still cant contribute with images but i put the art of the game played, in this case a beautiful game played in 2004 by Kramnik and Leko, with notes by GM Ray Keene.

Enjoy it:

LOB, absolutely bone chilling.

joaoporto, none to soon.  Beautiful game.

Thank you Aleva, IMHO they are both quite good #:)

What a wonderful thread!  These images and poems really made day.  

I did a search for more images from the Richier calendar and came up with this site, lots of chess-related art there.  Does anyone have any more info on Richier? 

Kieth Halonen  "Saturday At Morro Bay"

Morro Bay is in Northern California U.S.

This video was on this site a while ago.  Since film is certainly an art, I thought I would put the link here!  Watch this movie, Beyond the Move. <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qim8k7BW-6E&eurl=http://www.chess.com/videos>;

Oh man I love that Beyond the Move film... it's a must watch. Thanks for reminding me about it again themirrortwin!

catskincatskin wrote:

What a wonderful thread!  These images and poems really made day.  

I did a search for more images from the Richier calendar and came up with this site, lots of chess-related art there. 

 I love it.  Wouldn't it be something if one of the artists got a commission for new work out of all this....that would make my day #:)

Anna Madia  "Butterfly"

            Bedlam

I was brought here to recover
my presence of mind--
a pear-scented essence
which slipped through my fingers
like disobedient lotion,
pressed from glow-in-the-dark azaleas
nurtured in church basements.
Looks like somebody goofed, though.
The usual amenities
have proved less then therapeutic,
though we're provided with brocade
fainting couches now,
prodded to talk about
how it feels to be run over
repeatedly by late model cars.
Each of our sneezes
is captured on film
and screened for our families
on visitors' day.
Squirrels scamper
all over the grounds.
They come so close to my window
I can see their tiny sex organs
and monitor their hyper gnawings.
They tunnel through an apple
in under thirty seconds.
Nor are the thin unkissable lips
of the Nazi youth turned theologian
incarcerated next door a harmless sight,
as he mouthes songs about turtles
and shrimp slugging it out
in the warm waters
of the Gulf of Mexico.
No one will lift a finger to help me.
Yesterday, a doctor asked what I was
willing to give up to get well.
Daddy's moonshine?
The gun on the nightstand?
My rumpled piety?  I'm not picky,
but what was last night's
mysterious entree, anyway,
blanketed with that insane
dill-flecked homemade mayonnaise?
My next door neighbor is dead set
on converting me this mild morning,
though I've already told him
I've had one toe dipped
into his personal version
of the lapping afterlife for years,
and I find it less than temperate.
I listen to his melodramatic harangues
all through breakfast, trying to keep
the fireball of my attention
from shooting out of my head,
busting through the picture window
and incinerating the nearby pines.
We all lose ourselves sometimes.
But to render true service to another,
one must serve him without relinquishing
oneself.  Easier said than done.
This spreading darkness is not entirely
mine.  The dinged-up cafeteria ceiling
leads me to believe that though it's likely
I contracted my malady from the would-be
preacher, if I remain committed and vigilant,
my thoughts will soon reconvene
with more gravity than ever,
laced with caramelized terror,
delicately flavored with geranium.

           Amy Gerstler

Anna Madia  "Alice E Gli Scacchi"

Jose Roosevelt  "Deesse Automnale Endossant La Manteau De L' Invisibilite"

                   Planting

This is the hoe, this is the rubble &
dirt-filled yard, soil turning over to face the sun
whose winking eye burns the grass yellow.

this is the spade and claw
burrowing holes to bury the roots of sea grass,
ice plant, their long white fingers

reaching beneath the topsoil.  What doesn't die
will thrive on salt carried in from the ocean
in the early hours when the sky separates

from earth.  This is the clean day, early spring,
new season, soil rotting with beginning.  This is the start
of separation:  water from land, earth from sky,

seed from chaff.  The memories of cells
in their first division.  This is the day
burning off its soft outer shell.
And the blue sky falling down.

           Susan Dickman

(We interrupt the regularly scheduled programming to bring you cake' break from chess for a post, please bear with us:)

This is for you catskincatskin #:)

Jose Roosevelt  "La Conquete Du Casque De Mambrino"

                                 THE WARRIOR

                              The warriors tame
                           The beasts in their past
                          So that the night's hoofs
                Can no longer break the jeweled vision
                                 In the heart.

                       The intelligent and the brave
                Open every closet in the future and evict
              All the mind's ghosts who have the bad habit
                           Of barfing everywhere.

                        For a long time the Universe
                   Has been germinating in your spine

                       But only a Pir* has the talent,
                              The courage to slay
                   The past-giant, the future-anxieties.

                                  The warrior
                            Wisely sits in a circle
                               With other men
                    Gathering the strength to unmask
                                    Himself,

                                      Then
                                  sits, giving,
                     Like a great illumined planet on
                                      The
                                     Earth.

                                     Hafiz

         * Persian: Saint

Jose Roosevelt  "Jeu D' Echecs/ Chess Game"

     To The Mistakes

You are the ones who
were not recognized
in time although you
may have been waiting
in full sight in broad
day from the first step
that set out toward you
and although you may
have prophesied
hung round with warnings
had your big pictures
in all the papers
yet in the flesh you
did not look like that
each of you in turn
seemed like no one else
you are the ones who
are really my own
never will leave me
forever after
or ever belong
to anyone else
you are the ones
I must have needed
the ones who led me
in spite of all that
was said about you
placing my footsteps
on the only way

   W.S Merwin

I just saw that PerfectGent had uploaded a chess painting of his own, and I'm going to take the liberty of making sure it ends up in this thread where it belongs... he captioned it as an "Old Chess friend who has passed away..."

/p.s. I think it was the 'Gent's birthday yesterday...

Jose Roosevelt  "Le Echiquier 3/ The Chessboard 3"

                            The Attic

It's September: I've moved into town,
into the attic of an old barn--a big open room I reach
by climbing a ladder that rises through a hole in the floor.
The room is long and high, with windows at each end,
a row of skylights that leak rain, and shake
and chatter in the northeast winds.  I sleep beneath
the roof's steep pitch, my mattress flat on the boards,
looking up at the high ceiling where morning
diffuses downward in grains of bright dust.

This was the old painter's studio,
the light in those famous canvases is still here
--he couldn't carry it away with him--
though his paintings took away everything else,
opening space with a stroke of blue or yellow.
I think of his violent loves, the stories
they still tell about him here.
But how quiet and alive his paintings were,
how they quiver with life not yet realized.

The town is quiet in September.
Sometimes I hear people talking in the street.
Last night someone said they were going to wait for Michael,
and a voice said that Michael had gone home.
I walk the narrow path down to the marsh.
Wind hard in the dunes.  Rain as I'm returning,
cutting through twisting streets, past gardens bent
low with rain, their colors a wash of gold.
I feel the air surround my body, feel it move
between my legs and between each finger.
as I walk, not mastering space, but in it.

And when the clouds open, the sky
so suddenly wide and high, no roof of leaves,
it seems there's nowhere to go but into sky or water.
I climb the narrow stairs that keep turning,
twisting inward, containing me, until they meet
the ceiling, which opens and I rise through the floor,
released into an openness I never learn to expect.

Excerpt from The Attic by  Cynthia Huntington

                                    Seen

In your field of vision, there is a place where no image is fixed.
It is a place where injury carved it's cave of nothing,
gathered blackness around a splinter's wooden slip.
One eye, you say, looks inward
while the other scans the world.  One eye
examines the self's invisible wanting.
In that equation, I believe myself to be
a point connecting one place to another,
somewhere you paused to draw lines to the next warm station.
I emit no light, no heat
but gather, in cupped hands, what fell to the ground
when limbs were shaken by your copper wind.

                        Mark Wunderlich

Henri Matisse  "Femme A Cote D' Un Echiquier"

                                           Morning

Salt shining behind its glass cylinder.
Milk in a blue bowl.  The yellow linoleum.
The cat stretching her black body from the pillow.
The way she makes her curvaceous response to the small, kind gesture.
Then laps the bowl clean.
Then wants to go out into the world
where she leaps lightly and for no apparent reason across the lawn,
then sits, perfectly still in the grass.
I watch her a little while, thinking:
what more could I do with wild words?
I stand in the cold kitchen, bowing down to her.
I stand in the cold kitchen, everything wonderful around me.

                               Mary Oliver