It’s Puzzling, Isn’t It?

Ken and I love to do jigsaw puzzles. We usually have one going in the kitchen where we can take a minute and pop in a few pieces between other work. I find it relaxing and I think there’s proven evidence that you get a little dopamine rush when a piece clicks. But sometimes I wonder about the people who design them, like what choices are they making with the illustrations? Case in point, last week, we got a new Charles Wysocki puzzle. Charles Wysocki was an American painter who specialized in “primitive Americana”. If you’ve ever done a Wysocki puzzle, you know it heavily features this idyllic view of late 1800s towns with a LOT of American flags everywhere, and as a Canadian, I find this weird, because I’ve never done a Canadian puzzle covered in OUR flag, but sometimes there are also clocks, so it all evens out. This week, though, I opened up the new puzzle and looked at the poster, excited to discover that all the buildings were antique stores and curiosity shops. “Oh, wow!” I said to Ken. “Look at all the cool stuff in the windows of these antique stores!” He agreed that it was going to be a lot of fun, considering we have an antique business ourselves, and I started to build the frame. But then I looked closer and something dawned on me: the painting the puzzle was based on represented life in the 1800s, and all the people were wearing old-timey clothes and driving horses and buggies so NONE OF THE THINGS IN THE WINDOWS WOULD BE ANTIQUES! The stuff in the stores were things that those people would have used every single day and probably thought were modern conveniences! Like the railroad lantern, the ironstone china, and the coffee grinder. So unless this town is one of those places where actors are all dressed up and pretend to be pioneers for the tourists, it’s seriously out of whack.

And it reminded me of the time that I started working on a Dowdle puzzle, which are based on the work of a different American artist, Eric Dowdle. This one was of Peggy’s Cove in Canada, which is strange considering he was from Utah, but it does explain the presence of a random Mountie standing by a flagpole, like that’s just what Mounties do all the time or whatnot. I started to piece the edge together as one does and immediately discovered that one of the pieces was all chewed up and distorted, like a dog had eaten it and spat (or sh*t) it back out. Oh well, I thought, at least it’s not missing, because I HATE when a puzzle has a missing piece, and I think I’ve written about suspecting Atlas of stealing puzzle pieces before. But it got worse. See, there are a lot of tiny human (?) figures in the puzzle, and as I started to pull them out, it became clear that the artist who designed it was, perhaps, really more into horror stories than pastoral scenes of a harbour town.

Like, OK, it’s bad enough that there are 4 dudes in three-piece suits and fedoras standing on a rock looking like they all want to talk to me about Jesus, and numerous people are hoisting giant lobsters in the air and swinging them around like that’s a completely normal activity (and maybe it is in Peggy’s Cove–I’m going there in August so I’ll keep you posted) but then, in the background, there’s this guy:

What the absolute f*ck is this guy doing, crawling out over a rock towards you like that girl from The Ring?! You don’t notice him at first, because there’s so much else going on, what with all the proselytizing and lobster waving, but once you do, HE’S ALL YOU SEE. And then suddenly it seems like maybe instead of an idyllic fishing village, this is a zombie town, and all the figures are now ominous and the lobsters are screaming for help. In the poster that came with the puzzle, he appeared to be wearing large, weird mittens on his hands, and I really didn’t want to find the rest of him in case he came to life and started crawling over the back of my couch.

So anyway, I’ll keep doing my Wysocki–I just won’t look too closely at the horses’ eyes, just in case they’re devil horses or something, because you never know…