The Art of Chess and ‘The Wonder of It All’
Watercolorist B.L. Taylor paints trio, donates artworks to Bridgeport library
By Tom Maguire
Do chess players make great subjects for a painting because of their cerebral prowess?
“Well, it’s easy because you guys are so available,” artist B.L. Taylor told me.
Yes, my chess buddies and I simply showed up and lucked out that the beaming watercolorist walked into the Sullivan Free Library at Bridgeport while we were trying to guess the next move by the white pieces in a published chess game. We never guessed the artist would go back to her studio on Oneida Lake to create a painting of us. It is among about 30 artworks she donated to the library as a fundraiser.
The painting of my chess group now hangs on the library wall. It depicts Karl Graverson, who sports, as he calls it, a “gunslinger mustache,” John Wolf (“Hopefully she blurs my face”) and me (an outgunned chess dilettante).
Taylor, who turned 88 in October 2025, and her husband, Richard “Dick” F. Bundy, certainly enlivened our grinding day of chess “checkologies,” as John would say. Bundy, a marriage and family therapist, and Taylor were visiting Central New York for the summer. The couple also has townhouses on a stream in New Jersey and on a river in Connecticut. “We are water people,” BL explained.
“I can paint anywhere,” she said (email taylorwatercolors@snet.net; 860-271-1949). “I can take my paints with me. I have a little tiny paint box and a little pad and I can paint wherever I am.”
“You can do quite a bit over 50,” she added with a laugh.
She went to art schools and painted in oils. But watercolor dries quicker than oils. Before she starts, Taylor picks out a frame for size. Then she designs the painting in her mind, sketches it and decides on the colors. For the painting of my chess trio, she practiced various mixtures to get the right flesh colors. “So it takes a long time,” she said.
Taylor showed me her initial sketch of us chess guys.
“Boy, you’re gonna do us up good,” I said.
“I’ll do you good,” she said. “And I’m giving it to the library. This would be a thousand dollars.”
In all, Taylor donated more than two dozen framed-in-birchwood prints that the Bridgeport library offered for sale. Additionally, she donated four actual paintings to the library.
“I love her paintings. They’re so bright and hopeful,” said the library’s branch manager, Della DeTore.
Taylor said she has finished about 400 or 500 hundred paintings. “If you’ve been painting as long as I have and you paint a couple a month, you’ve got 12 months of the year and you start building up a lot of paintings,” she said. “I will never finish learning watercolor.”
Her watercolors include a painting off a photograph of her father, John J. Benkendorf, piloting his boat, Ginger. He won a tall silver trophy as the “National Outboard Champion 1934, Outboard Runabout.” Taylor honored her father by creating a picture book, “A Young Farmer Who Was a Winner.”
Taylor was born in New Jersey. The family farm was only 15 minutes from New York City. One time, a news clipping from 1934 says, her father was racing his boat around Manhattan Island. A passing tugboat upset his boat and threw him into the water. In that same year the family started coming to Oneida Lake. Her husband grew up in Syracuse and his family built the lake camp called “Blessings.”
Taylor’s repertoire includes landscapes, seascapes, portraits and a few paintings of Oneida Lake. A commission painting of a backyard sold for $500 and one of a lake cabin went for $1,000. One riveting painting, “Choices in Brittany,” depicts a little girl with terrific puffy blond hair eyeing baskets for sale. Another painting, “Waiting for Papa,” shows a little boy in checkered blue cap looking out a window. Does Taylor strive for an emotional pull? Well, her brochure for the Bridgeport paintings is titled “The Wonder of It All.”
It says: “We rush through life and often don’t take time to say something like, ‘Look at that sky!’ I have tried, since childhood, to capture a small segment of that beauty. I hope that my work will help others to see the wonder in the world around us.”
One day at chess, DeTore presented my chess-playing friends and me with packages wrapped in white paper with green cord. Inside were gifts from Taylor: gorgeous framed prints of her painting of us!
“That’s astounding. That’s so nice of her,” said John Wolf.
“Pretty cool, pretty cool,” said Karl Graverson, scorekeeper of our chess games, flute player, jigsaw puzzle solver and owner of a cat named Gambit.
I let my wife, Jeanne, whose own paintings are on our walls, unwrap BL Taylor’s gift print depicting John Wolf, Graverson Karl and me at the chess boards. My two chess partners impress me with their “analyticalized,” as John Wolf would say, calculations on the chessboard. But BL Taylor kept her artwork’s title neutral: “Chess at Sullivan Free Library, Bridgeport, NY.”
“I love it,” Jeanne my wife said of the painting. “That took a lot of work.”
TOP PHOTO: ‘Chess at Sullivan Free Library, Bridgeport, NY,’ by BL Taylor.