There is a good case for filing this under "The Other Talent of..." in the Chess In Art Index. Except that we'd have to say "talents" plural. The subject of today's post has them in buckets, starting with her jazz singing; much acclaimed...
There is a good case for filing this under "The Other Talent of..." in the Chess In Art Index. Except that we'd have to say "talents" plural. The subject of today's post has them in buckets, starting with her jazz singing; much acclaimed among those in the know. She is Nette Robinson, but I'm not sure if she has recorded a cover of the Simon and Garfunkel hit on any of her albums. It is not, for example, on the retrospective Remembered Time (a homage to jazz pianist Bill Evans) that she made with the doyen of British jazz, Michael Garrick.Mrs. Robinson and Mr. GarrickPic by Sisi Burn, from hereHmmm...A successful jazz vocalist who is also an aspiring chesser - Nette is a member of Richmond and Twickenham Chess Club - that's a vanishingly small demographic, unlikely to be found elsewhere, and certainly not in the suggestive compilation below, which is hardcore instrumental. Another cover version.As if chess-playing and jazz-singing were not enough to keep her busy, Nette has mixed and matched another of her multi-talents to make jazz art.Left: Coltrane by Nette Robinson. Right: Prestige and Blue Note Album covers As you can see above, Nette's celebrations of the jazz greats are reworkings of images, invariably of solo performers, memorable from album covers such as on the classic Blue Note label. Here her emphatic brushwork and simplified tonality animate Coltrane in soaring flight. It has something of the quality of the grainy footage of his performances in the 60s. You can sense the ecstatic ascension as he surfs the crescent of his favourite thing: a twenty minute solo ("I don't know how to finish," he complained; "Just take the horn out of your mouth" Miles Davis famously suggested). Nette's painted portrait isn't earth-bound either. It, too, breaks free from the bare facts of a photographic image, however artful the latter may be. Re-mix and now we get chess art. Before we continue: yes, that was Nette with an article in the April 2013 issue of Chess.Emanuel Lasker front cover design, based on a painting by Nette Robinson, based on a...If you can't find her in the ECF grading list, it may be because she is there under her married name of Woods (so apologies to Miss. Robinson, or Mrs. Woods, for the small liberty with the title at the top), and very much on the lower reaches of the chess learning curve, as she would be the first to admit. But she clearly knows enough already about the game for it to inform her chess art, her other talent, and the one that interests us in this post.Many readers of Chess were at the private view of her chess art exhibition in the Muse Gallery in London's Portobello Road ten days ago (and now closed), though your blogger had, unfortunately for him, to be elsewhere, embroiled, as Streatham and Brixton CC was, in a crucial London League relegation battle. But a visit to the show the next day provided a chance to see her chess art in the flesh - and there is no substitute for seeing the real thing, paint, brush-marks, actual size, and all.First, let's look at her photo-sourced images of chess players - all well-known. Some are straightforwardly in pencil, delicately done; and there is one of Gary Kasparov, painted Coltrane-style, although it didn't seem to me to be as successful for a chess great as a jazz legend. This style works best, IMHO, when it is called on to do energy, and for this image Gazza models dead-pan.Going a step further in the exploitation of flat tone (white, black and a grey or two), now in defined blocks with the painterly gestures suppressed, Nette has developed a simplified style that has surprising expressive power - less is more indeed - especially with a cropped, raking, assymetric composition; and the familiarity of the subjects does not get in the way, far from it.Mikhail TalThe one that appealed to me the most was of Tigran Petrosian, as recognisable for his hairline as Tal was for his stare. Deep in ThoughtBoth Tal and Tigran, caught in their solitary absorption,