ART - just thought I'd add my two cents.......
http://www.chesmayne.info
01 A skill or knack, a method of doing a thing especially if it is difficult - studied action - artificiality in behaviour. “The beauty of nature exceeds all art” - G. Bredero. ‘Liberal arts’, the ‘7 liberal arts’ and ‘artes liberales’. Trivium: grammar, rhetoric and logic (dialectic). Quadrivium: music, arithmetic, geometry and astronomy. Sometimes portrayed as a wheel resting on an encyclopedia (the circle of knowledge). Quadrivium: arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy along with the Trivium constitute the Seven Liberal Arts. 20+ paintings are titled ‘Checkmate’.
“Art is meant to disturb, science reassures”.
02 Artful: crafty, cunning, tricky (tricky-dicky). Skillful in adapting means to ends - ingenious.
03 Artist: one who exhibits art in his/her work, or makes an art of his/her employment. An artist has to have lived!
“You can calculate the worth of a wo/man by the number of h/hes enemies, and the importance of a work of art by the harm that is spoken of it”.
“The artist must be in his work as God is in creation, invisible and all-powerful; one must sense him/her everywhere but never see him/her”.
“Why life? We live to execute a properly conceived life plan whereby each human being becomes an artistic genius. The Light’s knowledge and love are the paint and the inspiration that we, God’s little brushes, apply to earth’s giant canvas, allowing each of us to add our few, unique brush strokes to God’s Grand Painting of Life.” Michael Kelley.
04 Artist, Artisan are persons having superior skill or ability, or capable of a superior kind of workmanship. An artist is a person engaged in some type of fine art. An artisan is engaged in a manual enterprise.
05 Artiste: an artist especially an actor, dancer, or other public performer - thespian.
06 Artistic: aesthetically excellent or admirable - stormy, emotional, and capricious, as temperament or behaviour popularly ascribed to artists. Chess has been used by many artists in courtly, family and group portraitures and amongst these have been Lucas van Leyden, Henri Matisse and John Singer Sargent. Chess themes have also been used in abstract art, illuminated manuscripts, sculptures, mosaics, tapestries and book-plates ie, Titian’s masterpiece ‘Rest on the Flight into Egypt’, a 16th century painting, measuring 25” x 18” and set in an elaborate frame showing Mary cradling the baby Jesus during a rest as they flee into Egypt from KI Herod’s law, with Joseph looking on (value estimated to be around five million pounds). Craft or skill. Workers in wood/carpenter (Scotland: wright), trade of Joseph and Jesus.
Lucas van Leyden was a pioneer of the Netherlandish genre tradition, as witness his ‘Chess Players’ [Staatliche Museen, Berlin] which actually represents a variant game called ‘Courier’ - and his Card Players [Wilton House, Wiltshire], while his celebrated ‘Last Judgement’ triptych [Lakenhal Museum, Leiden, 1526-7] shows the heights to which he could rise as a religious painter. It eloquently displays his vivid imaginative powers, his marvelous skill as a colourist and his deft and fluid brushwork.
Source:
http://www.kfki.hu/~arthp/bio/l/lucas/biograph.html
07 Artists must be sacrificed to their art. Like bees, they must put their lives into the sting they give.
08 Artists who have included chess in their work: Daumier, Bill Jacklin, Paul Klee, Kandinsky, Juan Gris, Max Ernst, Escher, Barry Martin and Lorraine Gill (whose exhibition in February 1997 featured chess and mind sports). All include chess motifs in their works. Marcel Duchamp painted pictures of chess players.
‘Art’ depicts the human quest for self-knowledge (knowledge of the gods) and the attempt to portray or magically control the forces that rule life. Bas-reliefs of the victories of Assyrian KIs express an urgent desire to render their local glory immortal. In Greece and Rome sculptors like Phidias moulded stone into god-shapes in which men saw themselves. For a millennium all art was controlled by the Church. Not until the Renaissance did Giotto, Masagna, Dante, Boccaccio and Aristo again dare to express the old pagan themes. Botticelli, Leonardo, Michelangelo and others drew on Classical myth and Breughel and Vermeer began to celebrate everyday life and material wealth. Caravaggio, Bernini and other baroque masters drew on it. From Dante, Chaucer and Shakespeare to Blake, Joyce and Yeats - from medieval troubadours to Berlioz and Wagner - all are one in that myth inspires them. Without myth no artist works. The art of myth is owned by nobody, but is expressed by all with heart. Education and refinement are the decoration of the soul, making a gross mind into a spiritual work of art, the highest intellectual achievement.
“Art is the imposing of a pattern on experience, and aesthetic enjoyment is recognition of the pattern”.
Saraswati (India): goddess of the arts - literature, poetry, song, music and belles lettres (the finer or more elegant forms of literature regarded as the finest art). She is seen in paintings smiling happily, dressed in her gold-embroidered sari, holding a book, symbol of scholarship and writing, in one hand, and the vina, a stringed instrument in the other. She rides a swan, symbolizing that she is in control of her passions, which is a condition for the success of any artistic or literary endeavour. She is the goddess of speech and eloquence (polished language) and shown sitting on a lotus signifying meditation, lucidity of mind and clarity of expression or in the company of the peacock, the Indian royal bird so admired for its beauty. Her swan floats on a pond as smooth as a telescope mirror, reflecting her and signifying the serenity of mind necessary for clarity of language. She is sometimes shown with vina and hymnbook, rosary and lotus or carrying the vidya (emblem of knowledge) and a vessel of ambrosia and wears the moon in her crown. In Japan she is known as Benten.
“A thing of beauty is a joy for ever; its loveliness increases; it will never pass into nothingness”.
Beauty of Chess: “A good chess move is the expression of creativity. If the beautiful were not in us, how would we ever recognize it?”