A Mad Horological Party

Many, though not all, of the themes that inspire Chaykin as an artist are in some way connected to the timepieces he creates. In the case of the A Mad Horological Party artwork, the connection is clear: the concept for this artwork emerged as a metaphor for the creation of the highly complex White Rabbit watch, one of his most recent masterpieces, named after a character from Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. The artwork title is a direct quote from the book, specifically from its seventh chapter, “A Mad Tea-Party.” However, some clarification is needed, as the White Rabbit, the first magical character Alice encounters in the story, appears in the first chapter, not the seventh. The inspiration for Chaykin’s White Rabbit watch was the refreshingly strange idea that a white rabbit could use a pocket watch, which raises the logical question: why has Chaykin as a painter not been inspired (at least not yet) by the scene preceding the fall down the rabbit hole, or by the fall itself?

The answer lies in Konstantin Chaykin’s keen interest in Lewis Carroll’s references to the concept of time, and, as luck would have it, Chapter Seven contains many such remarks. As a watchmaker, Chaykin drew extensively from this chapter when developing his White Rabbit watch project, including the fundamental concept of the suspended time function (the “Time of a Mad Tea-Party” function), inspired by the Hatter’s admission that Time had stopped his time at six o’clock (“it’s always tea-time”), as well as the puzzling idea that a watch can display the day of the month and even the year without telling the time. Therefore, in the artwork A Mad Tea-Party, Chaykin depicts himself assembling the White Rabbit watch, surrounded by characters from Chapter Seven of Alice in Wonderland. It is important to note that these images are entirely products of his imagination.

The unfolding story inspired Konstantin Chaykin to further explore the world created by his imagination, influenced by the creative genius of Lewis Carroll. This resulted in several works that can be considered preparatory studies for the A Mad Horological Party artwork, such as March Har.1, Week-Maiden, Ahasuerus, and Dormouse, although they are undoubtedly self-sufficient artwork. This is especially true of Ahasuerus, which tells a separate story directly related to the development of the White Rabbit watch.

Subjects similar to Chaykin’s A Mad Horological Party are quite rare in the history of artwork. Artists typically paint self-portraits, choosing themselves as the model. Sometimes they choose the related genre of the hidden self-portrait, disguising their image as other characters. This approach was taken by Raphael in his fresco The School of Athens, Sandro Botticelli in The Adoration of the Magi, and Caravaggio in David with the Head of Goliath. Konstantin Chaykin favours the allegorical self-portrait, placing himself in seemingly realistic circumstances while simultaneously surrounding his figure with imaginary, mechanical characters of his own creation. In this sense, his A Mad Tea-Party is similar to some of Marc Chagall’s self-portraits, in which he sometimes supplemented his portrait with fantastic images of his own creation, for example, the figure of a flying man or a muse, as in the artwork Self Portrait with the Muse.

The artist’s active involvement in creating the “universe” he depicts defines Chaykin’s uniqueness as an artist. He portrays himself, quite realistically, as a watchmaker seated at his workbench, assembling the White Rabbit watch. However, the narrative is far from exhaustive: Chaykin is surrounded by the characters of a Mad Tea-Party—Alice, the March Hare, the Dormouse, and the Hatter—not as we are accustomed to imagining them, but as fantastical clockwork structures conceived by Chaykin, some of which have already appeared in his other artworks. This whimsical, phantasmagorical play of imagination is a hallmark of Chaykin as an artist, and in this, he is very close to the fairytale world of Alice in Wonderland.