This is my first new standard puzzle since Bicentennial Baloons and The House of the Seven Gables (scroll way back to April 10th 2009). The picture is by Salnave Philippe Auguste. He uses his last two names to sign his work but if you google him, use his first name to separate him from a medieval French king named Philippe Auguste. As you can see Philippe Auguste was influenced by Henri Roussseau as was Millevoix ( Jungle Scene, post dated November 9th, 2009 ).
Lion with Gray Hair is the first puzzle that I have designed completely from scratch in a very long time. I hope my designs have improved over the years but I am not so sure about that. All the figure pieces are animals, some extinct. I have tried to make the pieces a little smaller than in past designs. The puzzle is 13.2 x 19.7 and has about 660 pieces. I do think it is more difficult than Jungle Scene, a much earlier design.
I am working on another puzzle, designed from scratch, with a picture by a Haitian artist but one who, it would appear, was influenced by Vincent van Gogh rather than Henri Rousseau.
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A client wanted a large puzzle with not too many pieces for his wedding. He gave each guest a piece. They had to be large enough so that each guest could write a comment on “his piece”. I made a 24 x 30 puzzle with 154 pieces on it from a very good picture. The puzzle with comments is now hanging on a wall in a permanent frame.
What a beautiful place!
I designed the pieces on the sides and across the top bigger so the comments would not clash with the couple. Usually I do not like to put puzzles together only once. Of course this is an exception.
Jim Ayer Custom Puzzles, Family Jigsaw Puzzles, Puzzle Design, Uncategorized
I had a nice wedding blog planned for this week but that changed because of the tragedy in Haiti. After the immediate needs of the people are met and after the infrastructure has started to be rebuilt, the character of the society will have to be addressed. My father used to say that we should not impose our system on others and I used to think that each society should take care of itself. Those that couldn’t should stew in their own juices. Now I know that in some cases that attitude is morally wrong and often bad policy in an increasingly interconnected world.
In the NY Times this morning Bob Herbert writes ” No matter how overwhelming the tragedy, how bleak the outlook, no matter what malevolent forces the fates see fit to hurl at this tiny, beleaguered, mountainous, sun-splashed portion of the planet, there is no quit in the Haitian people.” In today’s Wall Street Journal Kevin Rozario writes about natural disasters – Lisbon in 1755 and Chicago in 1871 among others - and the opportunities they present for new and better future: ” The lesson was clear, and it was one that would resonate down through the centuries: With the right intervention, catastrophies presented extraordinary opportunities to make improvements.”
Haiti has received much aid over many years and yet has little to show for it. The challenge is to take that refusal to quit and combine it with a desire to take advantage of the “extraordinary opportunities”. That’s the big job, bigger than helping the sick and rebuilding the bricks and mortar of the country. It means schools, it means competant government and law inforcement with less corruption, it means jobs and it means hard work. It means the transformation of society. I hope the Haitian joie de vivre as shown in its art does not get lost.
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This blog is an altered reprint of a Fresh Ayer News article published in the fall of 1996. It serves as an introduction to several forthcomming blogs about Haitian puzzles. In the 1970s a friend began lending me his hand-made puzzles, one by one. They came by registered mail to be returned the same way. They were wonderful and a revelation to me since I was used to cardboard puzzles. I put togehter his dozen or so and looked around for more to buy. I quickly found I could not afford any good ones. Intricate, hand-made woden jigsaw puzzles were beyond my reach.
Years later I figured out how to cut wooden puzzles by machine. A two-axis computer controlled table could generate the shapes if only there were the equivelant of a round jigsaw blade that could cut in all directions. A waterjet did that job. Still it took more than a year of false starts and frustration to develop a reliable machine. Now it makes puzzles comparable to hand-cut ones at a fraction of the cost.
In the meantime, as fate would have it, my friend suddenly fell from wild success to failure. His collection of puzzles was lost in a fire and he ended in depression. I sent him some of my puzzles thinking the therapy would do him good. I got them back untouched. I decided to put together one of the larger Haitian hand-painted ones. As I started to lay out the pieces, my wife was in the next room watching the second presidential debate. She lasted through the whole thing which I thought was a heroic exercise in masochism. I had the better deal: I could get the gist without watching or paying attention.
Hand-painted Haitian jigsaw puzzles are really great for a number of reasons. First of all there is the patina, the feel of paint on wood, sometimes with the grain showing underneath the paint. Secondly, though the kerf is the same width, the paint obscures the cuts almost completely so they seem to disappear. Finally there is the exclusivity; each is unique. However, they are delicate. The edges tend to chip so the puzzles have to be handled with care. The art, though lively and colorful, is nothing to write home about. Good art is reproduced, not cut up. Some examples of good Haitian art reproduced in puzzles are shown in previous blogs.
Here is a wooden jigsaw puzzle hand-painted in Haiti. Note, there is a piece missing. With Gracie running around, one has to be more careful than I. Pieces dropped on the floor often get hidden away or chewed. Gracie is our West Highland Terrier – see blog dated May 15th, 2009.
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This puzzle of a painting by Berio Gizzi has been in my collection for some time. It’s a sleeper and should be more popular than it has been. To start with the original painting is amazing. It is the opposite of impresionistic, carefully composed and meticiously crafted. To quote from my 1999 catalog “The images include a portrait by Van Eyck, a photograph of Mr. Gizzi’s daughter, one of the artist’s own landscapes and a porcelain doll. The stairway after which the painting is named is dimly reflected in a mirror.” I assume that the person who ultimately puts the puzzle together has gotten it as a gift, does not know the picture and will be astonished seeing it evolve as the puzzle is put together. The cut design has several large figures made of more than one piece. I guess I can say that both the picture and puzzle design are equally quirky.
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I never realized that there can be beautiful images in Korans just as there are in the Bible. This is the leather front cover of an old Koran My father sent me a transparency of it, probably as a sly way to point out that there is a whole world out there beyond our western european tradition. The cover is old. You can see that in the picture. I did not “clean” the image up in Photoshop; I wanted the image to show its age. Koran Cover and the Elephant and the Mouse ( blog dated September 15th, 2009 ) are my most popular small, standard puzzles. They are both relatively easy because the wide borders can be put together first.
If you would like to follow Gracie’s latest exploits ( blog dated May 15th, 2009 ), go to www.whitediamondterriers.com. Under Daily Blog look up December 17th.
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A few months ago I started exercising with a personnal trainer. At my age, I need all the help I can get. Mike is a lawyer and Marine officer. While in Iraq he was part of a pay-back system to compensate innocent Iraqui civilians for losses incurred by “friendly fire”. (the loss of a goat for example.) Mike and a sargent with money set up shop and a croud of Iraquis would come to get their due. I suggesed to Mike that they must have been a jucy target for some nasties with mortars. Mike replied that the nasties never could figure out mortars but once a female suicide bomber was aprehended on the periphery before she could do much dammage.
I just finished a fascinating book: The Fourth Star by David Cloud and Greg Jaffe about four generals - George Casey, John Abizaid, Peter Chiarelli and David Patraeus - who slowly and painfully changed the army culture from conventional warfare, fighting the Russians on the plains of Germany, to counterinsurgency and nation building. Politicians and the civilian populace will have to embrace the same change. Mike’s job was an example. He is moving on to Colorado, his home, where he will be a federal prosecutor. We will all miss him.
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This wedding picture reminded me of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers a few generations later. It was a pleasure to make a puzzle from such a fun picture. I was asked to include the names of the bride, groom and their parents. Drop-out lettering would have detracted too much from the picture so Bob was one piece, Anne, Nate, Lisa and Jean were two pieces and Walter was three. Were I to do it again, I would pick either a more bold font or larger lettering.
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Our Congress at work.
This picture came to me with some text headed by “Should we buy them larger screen computers – or – a ticket home, permanently?”. Of course I thought, “send them home”. A few very late nights later I wondered if the picture had been “Photoshopped” by adding the solitare and facebook images to the screens. I forwarded the email with my questions to Jack. He answered: “This can be done on PShop, but it’s a nice job if it isn’t real…. However I wouldn’t throw’em out of office until I knew what kind of blather they were enduring at the time.” I should add here that the speaker on the right is the House Minority Leader and Jack is a California liberal. I did find out one thing: This is not the U.S. Congress as ”Our Congress” implies but the Connecticut Congress and the Connecticut House Minority Leader. It turns out I think that Jack is right; the picture is not altered and they don’t care because they know the blather that does go on.
I was brought up to believe in pictures though altering them is not new just much easier with digital photography. I am happy that doctoring pictures for puzzles just adds to the fun.
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Here is a picture of three of our granddaughters for an 11×14 custom jigsaw puzzle. The original pictures were “Photoshopped” into a collage by my son-in-law Jack Lee who is a musician by trade. He transformed his garage into a recording studio and records many acts around Los Angeles. Of course the resultant CDs need artwork so Jack trained himself in Photoshop. This is just an example of what can be done with a little imagination. A knowledge of Photoshop or similar software is a help but not really necessary because we can do that part. Really, your imagination is the limit.
Another advantage of a collage like this or especially the one in a previous blog dated September 29th. is that the individule pictures can be of lesser quality as they are not enlarged as much.
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