Quarantine lockdown is a great time to try a new or a long forgotten hobby. We’ve all spent hours watching movies, scrolling through Netflix, we’re sick of going in circles of Twitter-Instagram-Youtube-Facebook, and our thumbs hurt from being on the phone too long. It’s time to set away the multiple screens, go offline and try to enjoy something that requires a bit more thinking and a little less scrolling. Jigsaw puzzles sound kind of perfect right now. And if you feel like you’ve done all the ones you already have, try a new creative approach, like Tim Klein, a canadian artist.
Tim has found a very unique approach to jigsaw puzzles. It turns out that old, pre digital puzzles all use very similar patterns for their pieces and therefore if you want to you can mix and match them, even if they didn’t come from the same box.
He also prefers old vintage jigsaw puzzles because they tend to be less busy, and in most cases just feature a single object, while a lot of newer ones have been created with photoshop and have very busy and intricate designs on them.
He takes those vintage puzzles with photos of animals and objects and intertwines them to create his own unique vision, and create a new jigsaw puzzle. This way he can add an animal to a puzzle that was previously just a pretty view of the city or a flower field. He can create mutant creatures if he wishes to or manipulate the puzzle in a way where there’s a cow driving a vehicle, or a train that is powered by horselegs (get it? It’s literally horsepower in motion).
Tim finds it really fun to create these puzzle montages and discover something new within each vintage jigsaw puzzle box and imagining all the possible ways he can combine images. Tim has a website where you can find out more about his art and he also has a facebook page where you can follow him. His creative jigsaw puzzles are sold as art pieces and you can have one in your own home if you wish, provided it’s not sold out. It’s kind of difficult to make replicas since Tim needs the source puzzles to recreate them, and since those are vintage they’re not super easy to track down.
Tim also says that he was inspired to create the puzzle montages when he saw a magazine article in the 1980s where an art professor did a montage of a King Tut surrounded by beer cans. And recently he saw that the same art professor was trying to recreate the art piece for a gallery and was looking for a source puzzle. Miraculously Tim had the source puzzle needed and was able to mail it to the art professor. He got to take part in recreating an art piece that inspired him to create his own puzzle montages thirty years after he first saw it and got inspired. It’s funny how things sometimes come full circle decades later.
Tim has been getting quite a bit of media attention lately, and thanks to that he has sold out of a lot of his artworks. But he’s looking forward to creating new ones or attempting to recreate the fan favourites for those who wish to purchase them.