She came first.
I had planned to begin with the king — that's the logical place, the central piece, the figure everything else protects. But when I opened my sketchbook this morning, it was the queen who arrived. I wrote her name at the top of the page: The Standing Ones. The Queen Goddess. Celtic.
Her arms reach upward. Her robes fall straight to the ground. She is not a game piece — she is a presence.
Ispanky's Annunciation
On my studio desk right now sits a monograph — The Sculpture of Laszlo Ispanky — signed in his own hand: "To Robert, Laszlo Ispanky." I've had it for decades. I still open it.
His Annunciation stopped me this morning. A tall vertical figure, arms raised, a dove and ring overhead, the body elongated into something between the human and the sacred. That upward reach — the figure as a conduit between earth and sky — is exactly what I'm feeling for this queen.
Ispanky taught me that a sculpture can hold spiritual authority without being literal about it. The Annunciation doesn't explain itself. It simply stands, and you feel it. That's the standard I'm bringing to The Standing Ones.
What the Queen Goddess demands
She will be Celtic in character — ancient, pre-Christian, drawing from a tradition where the feminine held sovereignty over the land itself. Her arms raised are not supplication. They are command. She is calling something down, or sending something up — the viewer decides which.
In a standard chess set the queen is the most powerful piece on the board, yet she's often the least visually celebrated. Not in this set. She is monumental. At 5-10 pounds of bronze, she will have weight and presence that you feel before you pick her up.
The board she'll stand on
This is a limited edition — five sets, bronze only. The board is 48"×48" with 6"×6" squares. Each of the 32 pieces will be differentiated by patina. These are long jobs, as I noted in my planning book, and I mean that in the best possible way. Work worth doing takes the time it takes.
The weathered wood already leaning against the wall of my property has been waiting longer than this project has existed. Materials find you when the work is ready.
Following the Annunciation home
When Ispanky was alive I could walk into his studio and ask him what he was reaching for with a piece. He would answer in that intense way of his — not patiently, but passionately, like the question deserved everything he had.
I ask myself the same question now about this queen: what are you reaching for?
The answer keeps coming back the same way. She is reaching for the thing that chess has always really been about — not winning, but the full dignity of every piece on the board.
Follow the journey
This chess set will unfold here in the studio blog as it develops — from sketchbook to bronze. If you want to follow along in real time, find me here:
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