Sheet Music

IAS Community Gallery are proud to present Sheet Music, an evolving exhibition spanning drawing, painting, sculpture and music Jake Fairweather.

Sheet Music celebrates playful experimentation in art, where an artist makes, considers and refines in never ending process. Through a focus on the game of chess, Fairweather explores the order and disorder that we constantly encounter as individuals working and living within structured environments.

Sheet Music

How to create the most beautiful chess set:

First the pieces must be simplified. Distilled to their essence.

The hats, robes, and ornaments are removed, replaced by abstract shapes and allusions. Man Ray did this in 1920 but his set is still rooted in history and culture. We want to reach the most minimal set possible.

So the curves of traditional wood-turning are shorn, leaving geometric shapes that describe the movements of the pieces, ie the bishop moves diagonally, and so the new bishop form should be some type of x or cross. Josef Hartwig did this in 1932 but still he and the Bauhaus didn’t go far enough, we can distil the design further, past architecture, past geology, into mathematics. The plinths of Hartwig’s pieces, the sphere of Hartwig’s queen, we now discard these in favour of the simplest possible expression of form follows function. The cross is refined down into diamond, to use the fewest number of planes.

We arrive upon six fundamental silhouettes: the triangle, the square, the diamond, the octagon, the star, and the unusual star.

Respectively: 

The pawn, the rook, the bishop, the queen, the king and the knight.

At this stage we have made the platonic ideal chess set, but this is not yet the most beautiful chess set. This is the blueprint with none of the colour, beauty, tragedy, or desire. The difference between reading sheet music and listening to the orchestra.

Chess is after all a human game.

The figure is reintroduced into the chess design process. There is a parallel between battle and dance. Chess and ballet are similarly both closed systems with codified rules, yet despite this they are adaptive, evolving forms. 

Taking the geometric chess shapes as a starting point, various models are asked to pose in the manner they think each piece would take. By observing what commonalities arise from across these interpretations archetypes can be established.

A series of life drawings is made to develop what the essential pose of each piece is. 

There is no right answer, but it’s fun to pretend there is. The more seriously this task is undertaken the better. 

The angles of the hands and feet may inform the directional choices a piece may move in. How near or far the limbs are outstretched may suggest range. The relationship of the shoulders or the tilt of the chin can say a lot about the piece’s character. The value of a piece, its place in the hierarchy, or proximity to the divine, could be indicated by how upright or bent over its pose is.

The straight angles of the geometric chess set are transposed into the flowing lines of action of the figure. These life drawings will be painted over as loosely and quickly as possible, recreating the messyness of duels. 

All of these considerations made, you will have achieved the most beautiful chess set. Or at the very least, one that physically manifests the balletic poetry of the game and its continuous evolution.

Jake Fairweather is a multi-disciplinary artist working across drawing, painting, sculpture and animation. He teaches painting at Inverlochy Art School and runs
life drawing at the Wellington School of Drawing.