Checkmate at Dawn
Painting Four
"Checkmate at Dawn"
Otherwise known as "The Preemptive Strike".
A series of four small paintings,
an abstracted still life of Japanese hand carved chess pieces,
king and knight, in a real check mate that appeared in the chess section of the
New York Times,
sometime in the autumn of 1965 (The Greenwich Village Period).
Oil on canvas.
By the advent of dawn, it's all over. Checkmate at dawn. While arguably the preemptive strike was that attempted by the white king, the knight was the one who truly mounted the authentic preemptive operation in how he placed his forces in the field and when he used them. The mystery is that we see that the knight is a white one and not red. This might infer that the knight was once trained or financed by the white king.
Click here for the complete overview, The Premonition of the Checkmate at Dawn.
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Click here to return to the same place on the Greenwich Village Period Series page.
Click here to return to the same place on the Voice Introduction for Oil Paintings page four.