My Great Aunt Henny (Helen of Pastiche Picture Books and Median) produced several pastels of her relatives at the chess table in the 1930’s.  Some have backgrounds. Some do not. There is a great economy of gesture to these particular drawings. The men’s club/library table lighting created unusual pools of light and shadows.  I always admired the way that a sense of drama was created by integrating lighting with such simple gesture.  I can even remember talking to Henny about pastels (in general) in the very room where she had  sketched these decades before. She had been 84. I was 19 -  and a bit intimidated by her formal manner. (not to mention obvious talent) But as we looked at books, and as she began to tell me what she thought of various pictures - Berthe Morisot and Mary Cassatt mostly - I began to realize how she was really even more cool a person than I had ever realized.  Sure, she was the ever so sweet aunt I had always known.  But here she was, a person of intelligent insight, talent, and considerable idiosyncratic agency.  Perhaps it was my being on the cusp of adulthood that let me realize this in a meaningful way at this moment for the first time.  She eventually wound up giving me these books!  I poured over them for weeks, especially the one on the influence of Japanese print makers on French painting in the late 19th century.  I began to associate the intense popping patterns of Cassatt’s prints with this conversation with Henny.  For a while I became obsessed with the flatness of pattern.

I had been thinking of trying to produce a variation on these chess player pastels for years when I finally settled on a more slouchy 1970’s teenager version of this kind of scene.  This was to be On The Table with Jonathan Friend.  But in the process I had briefly considered this composition.  It is from a 1977 photo (likely taken by my Dad) of my brother Andy and me at our Gillespie cousins' summer cottage at Curly Rocks.  We are likely playing “Cheat” (the more Canadian iteration of “I doubt it”) - a game that is best enjoyed when multiple players find extravagant ways to deceive one another, up to and sometimes including hiding cards in one’s underpants. I rejected the composition initially because of the excessive pattern of the clothing (there had been a checker blue oil cloth table cloth too);  but as my brother’s 50th birthday approached I realized that the pattern might become the core of the piece.  The black and white of On The Table might be a good way to reproduce the dramatic lighting of Henny’s original chess players; but the dueling plaids of this might be a nod to the conversation about pattern, pastels,  Japanese print making  and Mary Cassatt, the conversation that had taken place in the very room where these long ago chess players  had been sketched. There are a few too many tangles of symbols for me to lay them out all at once; but suffice it to say that this picture has a satisfying nexus of sentimental  associations that made it perfect for the occasion of Andy's 50th. 

Unfortunately, the source photo was a mess.  The precise delineation of the faces by the color markers may leave a bit to be desired.  The aggressive over commitment to pigment in my face is more successful.  Andy’s late 70’s haystack of hair is confusing; but it really did look that way.  The plaid of Andy’s shirt works - but only when one looks close in.  It’s overall whiteness detracts from what might be a more striking contrast with the white background.  The checkered pattern of my shirt, however, does do what I had hoped for, and the extreme side part that plagued my hair during that era makes for a better composition.  It is a little detail; but I kind of like the belt in my blue jeans.  The hands are a mess; but that is not important.  They are just racks for the cards, the game, the thing(s) being shared - that which lives in the empty synaptic space at the center of the picture.