I've been mostly making up jigsaws of landscapes (there doesn't seem to be a verb to denote this...to jigsaw? to piece? to assemble?), but this lady caught my eye. Harmless piece of entertainment, I thought. Wrongly, as it turned out. This particular jigsaw was quite difficult to assemble; all the bits looked the same. What I discovered, though, was that assembling it taught me a great deal about Van Gogh and how he used paint. Yeah, okay, I knew that already, intellectually. I've stood in front of several of his paintings, and thought about how he moved paint around, how he added marks to the canvas. Somehow, though, piecing together disassembled brush marks really made me think about them, almost to experience them, though without the mess of actually painting (we're in a new house, of which more another time, and I have no painting studio as yet...hell, I have no studio set up at all so far). It also allowed me to appreciate the tonal subtleties of the piece. Tonal subtlety isn't really something I've associated with Van Gogh... I was wrong.
There's also something about looking, and looking carefully. There's nothing like a jigsaw to make you really look at what you have in front of you, and reach an understanding of it. No, that bit doesn't fit there, but it does match the colours... not there, either...but there, it fits. No matter how good we think we are at observation, a jigsaw makes us better.
This exercise in proxy creativity also made me think about my own painting, and drawing. I make marks similar to those black, semi abstract heart shapes at the bottom of the canvas, in paint, dye and stitch. Mine tend to be rune-inspired, or Celtic in origin. Maybe it's time I did more of that kind of loose work. And those are important thoughts, at a time when I'm really not sure where I'm going, what I'm going to do next, at a time when I have to recognise, once and for all, that my energy is severely limited, as is my space, so even the huge cull I had before we moved here from Norfolk was not severe enough. I feel I need to get this last cull right, even although I know that getting rid of things is not the end of the world, as things can be replaced at the right time, the time when you actually need them, instead of hoarding them against a future that probably won't ever arrive, certainly not in the form you expected.
So, there you are. Creativity, learning and reflection encouraged by the simple act of making a jigsaw. Which artist will I study next...?
