Chess WIP1

When my son was a young baby, we went to Switzerland on holiday and he was fascinated by a large chess set that was situated across the street from our hotel.  His favourite 'game' was to crawl around and  knock over the chess pieces. I thought this would be a fun idea to play with in a painting.

 I was also fascinated by this quote: "The chess board is the world, the pieces are the phenomena of the universe, the rules of the game are what we call the laws of Nature."

— Thomas Huxely

Life is full of beaurocracy, rules to obide by and regulations that stipulate what is the correct way for us to proceed, but… the unexpected sometimes happens, whether this be man made or natural, and life is all about dealing with these unexpected twists and turns as well as following the norm.

In my outline I  decided to use the image of Alexander knocking over the chess piece from my reference photo but instead of the usual sized chess pieces I decided to make each piece enormous and have the chess board stretching off into the distance.

as you can see the actual chess pieces I am using are only small ones. So I had to take a little liberty with perspective in my drawing.

 So why the big pieces? 

A baby is so small in the world and yet,  it has such a huge impact on the lives of the whole family. You can plan so much but the unexpected often happens. So, in my outline, all the chess pieces (the family members), have followed the rules of life (the game rules) and positioned themselves ready to reach their ultimate goal(to check mate the opposing king)  but the small baby just comes along and knocks him over.

I know I am going to have lots of fun with this one:)

 

Ona