Founder of chesscanvas.com, Samuel Alison is an Australian artist from Sydney specialising in acrylic impasto paintings and digital media, exploring the intersections of fine art and chess. A recent graduate of the National Art School, Sydney, Australia with a major in painting, Sam is an emerging figure in the contemporary art scene.

Sam’s practice has evolved significantly over time and has consistently produced a prolific amount of work since a very young age. After completing his secondary education on a full academic scholarship at The King's School, North Parramatta, and fluent in French by the end of his time there, in his youth he engaged in the graffiti scene, progressing to commissioned murals between both Sydney, Australia and Bordeaux, France, where he lived half the time during his early 20's. His self-funded residency in Europe finished at the commencement of COVID, and after 3 years in France and a year in Belgrade, Serbia (his heritage) learning the Serbian language, he returned to Sydney to study his Bachelor of Fine Art at the National Art School, Darlinghurst, majoring in Painting. It was between these two shifting events, under lockdown in Sydney during COVID 2020, that Sam discovered chess. In the silent and lingering, meditative state that was COVID for so many also taking up new hobbies, and with the advent of the huge popularity of the Netflix hit "The Queen's Gambit", Sam became, like so many globally at this time, completely taken by the game, spending hours each day playing 2D games online on his phone and begging all of his friends to play games with him. This obsession persisted into art school the following year, and whilst engaging with all art forms, Sam left about as much time to make art as play chess at the university or the student pub nearby, often coupling social chess play with drawing a observational charcoal sketches or coloured oil pastel landscapes, (a side practice he still very much enjoys doing and is committed to). Whilst enjoying his time at NAS he filled his art history notebooks with hundreds of geometric scribbles resembling chess positions, a micro-practice that became the subconscious nucleus that would very soon after become his primary practice. These abstract markings eventually turned into painted experiments, and upon entering his final year and looking down at the single, battered, over-used chessboard he carried everywhere, with trace markings scratched into its wooden surface, he understood immediately what he was going to make next, which became the basis for the endeavour of chesscanvas.com itself. Whilst making his first large painting experiments during this final year, Sam spent a larger portion of time collaborating with Austin, his coding partner who executed Sam's designs for the computer program used to generate a map of chess gameplay for the purpose of personalised prints. Sam first demonstrated this program to a large audience at the National Art School's event "NAS NEO 2023" and its "Open Day 2023" with a giant chessboard and large projection of his interactive artwork, inviting members of the public to play live games and receive prints on-site. For his grad show he displayed an equally monumental piece titled "Stockfish vs Lella Chess Zero"(2023), a series of 100 15x15cm aluminium chromaluxe tile prints of 100 chess games played in the Top Chess Engine Championship (TCEC) 2023, a project that aimed to highlight the equally monumental impact that "the chess gods" or "chess engines" (a form of artificial intelligence specifically designed for chess gameplay), have had on the game, showcasing AI’s creative potential while raising questions about humanity's place in an increasingly technological world dominated by large data sets. This series was a centrepiece of his Bachelor of Fine Art Grad Show, marking the start of his deep dive into the relationship between art, chess, A.I. and human life.

After selling his final paintings made at art school on the VIP night of his Graduation Show 2023 at NAS, and simultaneously working on his chesscanvas.com project, Sam’s current painting practice since December 2023 through 2024 until now includes a substantial series of large abstract acrylic and impasto paintings inspired by the linear movements of chess pieces, an aesthetic matching the purity of chess gameplay in its never-ending exploration of abstract geometric composition. Using palette knives and a dynamic scraping technique, he manipulates acrylic impasto while wet, creating heavily textured, monochromatic and coloured pieces that trace the spirit of countless considered moves between two minds over a bird's eye view of the chessboard, reminiscent of online chess gameplay which he partakes in on his smartphone during their creation, using real moves to inspire his mark-making. This essential chess spirit is captured by sticking to the limitation of the verticality seen in the behaviour of pawns, rooks, kings and queens, horizontality seen in kings, queens and rooks, the diagonals of bishops, queens, kings and capturing pawns, and the irregular 26.57 degree angles of knights, to create dynamic, almost 3-dimensional all-over action paintings, whilst currently expanding into colour in his most recent works. His work is also inspired by Marcel Duchamp’s musings on the hidden, limitless abstract aesthetics within chess and the emotional impact of gestural action. Samuel maintains that this gestural action is a quintessential social characteristic embedded in serious and passionate chess gameplay over the board seen in the physical movement of pieces by hand, a quality which he stresses in his decision to make only free-hand marks. In this way he intends to allude to the imperfect, human attempt in chess play of making perfectly straight marks seen only in the mind, much like his original wooden chessboard battered by constant human play with imperfect attempts at perfect linearity. His coloured pieces aim to go further in their depiction of the many emotional states experienced during various parts of chess gameplay.

Looking forward, Sam plans to expand his practice through oil paintings, app and web development, VR, CAD- programmed sculpture, private and public events and community-driven projects. By combining art, technology, and logic, he aims to create immersive, socially engaging experiences that deepen the viewer’s understanding of the complexities within chess - a timeless, ancient imitator of life.