I was going through some older posts from this blog when I came across a couple that featured some of my paintings on the website Jigsaw Planet. It’s a site that allows viewers to either choose from a large group of puzzles or to upload their own images and create jigsaw puzzles that they can assemble on their screens. It’s an interesting diversion.
For me, the interest comes in seeing my colors and forms deconstructed, getting to see them in singular bits that allow me to examine their texture and depth away from their normal surroundings. I am sometimes surprised, mostly pleasantly so, by what I see. And, despite having an advantage in knowing these painting intimately, I still struggle at some points in putting them back together– mainly because I find myself just examining the individual pieces for an extended period of time
So this morning I went to a page on the Jigsaw Planet site from a regular reader of this blog who goes by the moniker TheWOL ( and who also writes a blog called The Owl Undergound) and has posted a number of my paintings there. There were a couple of new paintings that are featured in my upcoming June show at the Principle Gallery so I thought I’d share one with you today. It’s Early Riser which you can see in full at the bottom and in partial reconstruction above.
If you want to try your hand at figuring out the puzzle of this painting or any of the others TheWOL has posted, click here.
Redtree Times 
Thanks for the shout out. You cite several of the reasons I like taking artwork and making puzzles out of them. It deconstructs the image into smaller bits and helps concentrate the eye on specific portions of the image, and on detail versus overall composition. Then at the end, when you’ve worked the puzzle, you get the prize of the complete image to study with renewed insight into how it is the some of it’s components.
Make that “the sum of its components” — And music. You need music. Peaceful, flowing music, like Tingstad and Rumbel, or Kevin Kendle’s “Journey to Atlantis.” Or Bach’s “Well tempered Clavier” — something wordless, something mountain brookish, long, flowing and sparkling, many-threaded, so the mind will unclinch, take off the corset of worlds and words, and peace will flow up from the center spring and soak up through the layers and saturate.
Well put, indeed.