It's been an unusual week. As I mentioned the other day Dunk bought me a puzzle for my birthday. It comes from Pomegranate Artpiece Puzzles (bought via Speedyhen). Apparently a puzzle of Jackson Pollock's Convergence was first produced back in 1964, marketed as 'the world's most difficult puzzle', and sold hundreds of thousands of copies. It definitely was a very difficult puzzle. We started with the traditional edge method, and then managed to put together a few groups based on distinctive lines in the picture, however after that it felt like a herculean task; each piece could vaguely be described as beige with some black and some yellow or red, even the pieces which seemed mostly one colour often did not belong where you expected. We laboured through about a week where putting in a couple of pieces an hour seemed like a massive achievement. I changed the method to studying the picture, searching for individual pieces and then placing them within the frame roughly where they belonged, occasionally managing to attach them to something else that was already there.
I worked for fourteen hours, getting Monkey up around 9 or so to help; Tish mainly felt sorry for herself but occasionally managed to join in. We did have Gilmour Girls on in the background for company. It has a very meditative effect to study the details of such a random image and I felt surprisingly relaxed when I finally gave in and went to bed. And this is how it looked by the end of the day:
We decided it would be brilliant to go and see the original painting, a huge canvas nearly four metres wide, but then discovered it is at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo New York, so that's another trip for the wishlist.
