Fruit and flowers
Laws. A month behind on my puzzling journal.
This one (from Artifact's Hoefnagel Club) is Jacob van Hulsdonck's Still Life with Lemons, Oranges and a Pomegranate (ca. 1620-1640). Just my cup of tea: I love paintings of blue-and-white china heaped with fruit. He's caught the textures so beautifully, the lucencies of porcelain and pomegranate seeds, the waxiness of flowers, the roughness of rind. Spot the moth.
It's a tricky cut, all chains of hexes in odd lengths, like fragments of chromosomes. Some part of every piece could fit anywhere. Given the image (all those lemons! that black background!), parts of this were fiendish. And the fit is mostly contiguous rather than connected, like an unsecured mosaic. Very vulnerable to scattering when bumped.
The whimsies are pretty simplistic. I do like the pear made of orange (nice joke) and the jug, but what on earth is that car doing here?
Paired with the van Hulsdonck was Van Gogh's Almond Blossoms (1890). An intricate, lovely image, and too utterly Nine-colored. Damn, did that guy know branches. I'm of two minds about the fancy edge. On the hand, it's delicious to solve; on the other, too delicious, treating a masterpiece as marzipan. But hey, all these puzzles make toys of art: if I'm going to complain about kitsch, I'd stop doing them.
When I'd finished and flipped over, I had a lovely surprise. Oh, the rainstorm!
Complete with a Morton Salt girl.
Sweet pastoral whimsies—but what the frog is that boy doing? Bouncing on a whoopee cushion is my politest guess.
Nine
This one (from Artifact's Hoefnagel Club) is Jacob van Hulsdonck's Still Life with Lemons, Oranges and a Pomegranate (ca. 1620-1640). Just my cup of tea: I love paintings of blue-and-white china heaped with fruit. He's caught the textures so beautifully, the lucencies of porcelain and pomegranate seeds, the waxiness of flowers, the roughness of rind. Spot the moth.
It's a tricky cut, all chains of hexes in odd lengths, like fragments of chromosomes. Some part of every piece could fit anywhere. Given the image (all those lemons! that black background!), parts of this were fiendish. And the fit is mostly contiguous rather than connected, like an unsecured mosaic. Very vulnerable to scattering when bumped.
The whimsies are pretty simplistic. I do like the pear made of orange (nice joke) and the jug, but what on earth is that car doing here?
Paired with the van Hulsdonck was Van Gogh's Almond Blossoms (1890). An intricate, lovely image, and too utterly Nine-colored. Damn, did that guy know branches. I'm of two minds about the fancy edge. On the hand, it's delicious to solve; on the other, too delicious, treating a masterpiece as marzipan. But hey, all these puzzles make toys of art: if I'm going to complain about kitsch, I'd stop doing them.
When I'd finished and flipped over, I had a lovely surprise. Oh, the rainstorm!
Complete with a Morton Salt girl.
Sweet pastoral whimsies—but what the frog is that boy doing? Bouncing on a whoopee cushion is my politest guess.
Nine
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