There’s something magnetic about the checkered pattern.
Black and white, side by side — locked in contrast yet moving in rhythm.

For me it has never been just an aesthetic choice.
It’s a quiet manifesto against polarization —
a reminder that opposites can coexist without dissolving into sameness.
Each square keeps its identity yet together they form balance —
a pulse of difference that holds everything upright.

In Freemasonry, the black-and-white tiled floor represents life itself, checked with good and evil.
Across cultures, that pattern often returns…
African weaving, Mexican ceramics, and every culture that finds beauty in opposition. Ndebele women of Southern Africa use rhythmic geometries painting their huts, as a language of protection and belonging.

In modern art from Antwerp based painter Charlene Tyberghein who layers geometric patterns and everyday icons into visual riddles of surface and depth, to Riley’s optical grids, the checkered reappears.

It’s not about decoration.
It’s an act of recognition:

that harmony is not the absence of tension,

that every contrast carries the seed of connection.

So yes, maybe I’m a sucker for checkered.
It reminds me that contrasts can be kind…that beauty lies not in purity, but in dialogue