Anya's Starvation

Pen and Ink medium. Named after Anya Taylor-Joy, the actress who played Beth Harmon in Queen's Gambit.

Based on the "starving artist" archetype, This piece serves as a display of the mental dilemma that sometimes takes place in an artist's mind. In this work you can see the central figure struggling as she attempts to resolve the current chess position she is in while a shadowy figure covered in chess notation analyzes the game alongside her. Unbeknownst to the chess player (Anya), she actually has a winning position but her faith in her own capability is lacking as her shadow attempts to pull her away from the game with the chain around her neck.

Artists will occasionally face a "starving artist" phase. During said phase, they are aren't always and literally starving, but they find that they are incapable of executing artistic prowess at a level that exceeds their own expectations. Like the chess player, the artist will sometimes look down at their current work and feel disgusted or even ashamed of the work they've produced, deeming it unlikely to grant them a "winning" position in life. Eventually, they will find themselves starving, but only because they are convinced by their shadows that the grandiosity they crave is unattainable--that they have no contributing worth to the work they apply.

But like the chess player, artists also don't realize that they are playing a winning game, they just need to remain confident and continue to apply their mental strength to the task at hand. Eventually, they will discover a stroke of genius that allows them to win . For the chess player, her stroke of genius is to just simply sacrifice the Queen.