...BUT THERE IS NO HOMEWORK

Blog number 417 **** 15 September, 2010

I am doing a very interesting jigsaw puzzle now. It is a beach scene, but the picture shown on the cover is not the one that is the puzzle. Instead, it is a view from the eyes of a lifeguard who, along with everyone else, is running in panic away from the ocean. Coming at them from the ocean is a crowd of boats, submarines, rafts, ship wreaks, inner tubes, giant squid and other random and unusual flotsam and jetsam, all heading onto the beach.

The unusual thing about this puzzle is that the cover is useless as a guide. Nothing in the puzzle appears on the picture on the cover. 1000 pieces, no guide. Neat!

For most of my early jigsaw-puzzle-putting-together days, I toyed with the idea of trying to do a puzzle with every piece showing only the backside. I never got to do it because the pictures were so interesting. But this puzzle is kinda close to that. Yes? Ballpark anyhow?

The guy that painted this picture really had fun doing it. You can tell. I've done three of his puzzle paintings before. He has weird and funny things happening and the cartoon characters and the happenings are very strange. Two of the three paintings you could tell he really got a kick out of doing them. One ice skating scene, one parade, he had fun. A boat scene he painted, to me it looked like he was doing something he really wasn't interested in doing, but had to get done in order to sell it.

Another thing about this one I'm doing now - he painted an elaborate beach scene and then he painted an elaborate ocean scene. Two paintings that took a lot of time, talent and effort, for only one puzzle? Or does he have another that is the beach scene as seen from a captain on one of the boats? If so, I'd sure like to find that one. I'm gonna look.

Before this one, I did a 2000 piece puzzle of one of Van Gogh's paintings that I had never seen before. Doing it, I could almost get into Van Gogh's head and see how much joy and excitement he had doing the painting. It was like he couldn't wait to dip his brush into his palette and splash it onto his canvas. Faster! Faster! Faster! What a guy.

I once saw a movie about him and at the end of the movie, hundreds of his paintings were flashed upon the scene. I had no idea he painted so many paintings. You ordinarily see only a few selected pieces, ad infinitum.

He used objects, not to show them, but as carriers for color. He wasn't interested in how a chair or a person really looked. He just wanted something that he could color. I look upon him now as an abstract artist before there were abstract artists.

An abstract artist is interested in color or form, but they don't need an object, they just splash on the color wherever they feel it belongs. This is much better. This Van Gogh way. My artist hero.