Another Pomegranate puzzle
- 1000 pieces
- landscape mode – 40 wide, 25 tall (previous was portrait mode)
The previous puzzle was an homage to the homely details of the daily life and spiritual life of the Huichol people. It was an endless swarm of cute little critters scurrying about in the puzzle.
It took a long time to to get them all in their places. 😉
This one has a whole different feel.
A pure, stylized version of nature at it’s finest – the Yosemite Valley.
I just noticed notes to myself on the box that there are four missing pieces fron the last time! Shame on me!
I like Phyllis Shafer’s art.
I’m pretty sure I got this puzzle at the NMA (Nevada Museum of Art) bookstore when Shafer had a show there.
That lovely building with its lovely rooftop deck looking out at the Sierras was a perfect venue for her. Gosh I miss walking to the First Thursday cocktail parties there. I probably went to three or four of those parties while her paintings were showing.
I probably got this puzzle on another day, not at the party, because then I would have had to carry it for the rest of my fun Reno evening. 🙂
Links:
- her website.
- her works on paper
- View to Ebbetts Pass (2021) grabbed my eye!
- her oil paintings
- Her works on paper works look exactly like her oil paintings !
- I don’t know if that’s normal, but it’s interesting.
- The painting of this puzzle.
- Sharp-eyed readers will note that it has more square aspect ratio than our 40×25 puzzle, so the the puzzle image is cropped a bit at the top and bottom to fit the 8×5 box!
- The website does feature her solo show at the Nevada Museum of Art!
Nosing around her site, her paintings are almost all of High Sierra scenes. I see that she is represented by the good ole Stremmel Gallery in Reno, which warms my my heart!
The internet calls this style of art plein air! That sounds pretty fancy, but in fact it translates simply as “open air“!
So if you are painting outdoor scenes, and you set up your easel and paints outside and do your painting outdoors, then you are a plein air painter!
This is an actual photo of Yosemite Valley.
It shows a lot more of Half Dome. Ms Shafer must have set up her easel further into the valley, because Half Dome is just a tiny little thing peeking over the edge in her painting.
This puzzle
The gorgeous, stylized sky and the face of El Capitan were the first parts that caught my eye.
Turns out the face of El Capitan was a lot easier than the sky. The sky is a pain in the butt. Those big swirls of white clouds on blue sky look pretty simple, but they all look kinda alike, so it’s hard to see which swirl a particular piece belongs to!
little over halfway through..
So many swirls!
Everybody makes their water swirl, but Shafer makes her clouds swirl! The really distinct thing is that the water plants swirl, the weeds swirl, and the undergrowth hella swirls (! 🙂
pretty pieces
Ten days later, I’m almost done!
It really is a pretty puzzle, with gorgeous pieces.
It has taken longer than I thought it would to finish.
Really almost done now
One week later, still at it …
Here is one more picture that I hope show why it’s slow.
This is every part of the puzzle with empty spots, and every piece that I haven’t lost!
If you count the empty spots and the pieces, there’s not enough pieces to fill ’em all. But more to the point of why I took this pic, the holes are spread out, so plugging one gts you no farther along in plugging the next one.
For some reason it sort of theraputic to share this with you 🙂