Jigsaw justification

I've been wasting time on an online jigsaw puzzle site, but I justify it with the education I'm getting.  I find myself drawn to the artwork ones, a lot of which are pretty damn twee, but there's also a plethora of Manet, Monet, Dürer, Botticelli, and Van Gogh.  

Especially Van Gogh. 

Tons of Van Gogh.

What fascinates me is how the bits of the puzzle - as I pull them together without referring to the organic original image, thank you very much - are just almost indistinguishable blobs and slashes of colour, or images that I fancy are there.  The closer I come to completing it, the colours become stronger and the elements clearer, and the lines more exact.  Are my eyes doing the work of bringing the art into focus? Or is it my brain filling in, much as it does when I'm listening to far-off familiar music, that I can't fully hear?

The finished picture is almost unrecognisable from what I have imagined at the beginning.

Is that how great artists work? Placing the lines, strokes, and colours just so, to let the viewer knit them together?

I came across a Van Gogh I didn't know.  It was brilliant - clusters of strong colours, looking like a bouquet of bright flowers.  As I worked, it became a scene of workers in a yellow field, with oranges and greens and a golden sky.

The painting turned out to be The Red Vineyards near Arle - and apparently, it's the one work for which there's a record of Van Gogh making a sale.  It's now in Russia.

I love it.  

Perhaps I'm not wasting my time.

(Yeah, I probably am.)

Once in a blue moon

So I had one chance, and one chance only, to see the "Van Gogh Up Close" exhibit which is having its one Canadian stop at the National Gallery. I booked tickets for the first group of the day and used my time-honoured art gallery strategy which works particularly well at popular showings: I strode past all the people bunching up at the first pictures at the beginning of the exhibit, and made my way past small gatherings of slightly suspicious security staff to the very last room and started working my way backwards. This way, I had nearly two rooms to myself.

I also don't go to every single painting; I scan the walls and go to those that call to me. The first one that drew me in was the one you see above. It's called "Tree Trunks in the Grass", and it was painted some time during the last six months of Van Gogh's life.

As I "listened" for other paintings (and about half a dozen kept pulling me back), I remembered the first (and only other) Van Gogh exhibit I saw some years ago in Toronto. I used my strategy then and got hypnotised by a contemporary of Van Gogh's named Louis Anquetin. See if you agree:
Oh, and there really is a blue moon tonight.