31 piece puzzle

I've always been a fan of puzzles and lately my parents have had one going at their house. When I visit I finish the hard parts of the puzzle, although one puzzle, which depicted Monet's painting of the Japanese bridge proved to be too difficult once. Here I have a puzzle app called puzzle king on my smart phone which scratches the puzzle itch and takes up a lot less space than a real puzzle. In the painting, I fitted together about 31 'pieces' of colours. It started off with a palette cleaning of my location palettes, then I switched to my 'everything palette' which has a sample of most of my paints. Since 2020 I went on a paint buying spree and ended up with more tubes that needed. Certain colours run out more than others, especially yellow. Van Gogh used to run out of yellow and blue all the time since he was doing a lot of paintings of hay fields and blue skies. To get more paint he would write a letter to his brother, who would go to the paint maker in Paris and have the tubes and brushes shipped down to him in southern France. Most of Van Gogh's letters that he wrote to his brother and a few other correspondents still exist, I found an on-line archive of the letters and read through them. One interesting tidbit was that he worried that his painting Starry Night, the famous one, was too abstract. In fact he was mostly a realist painter, or impressionist painter, so the Starry Night was a one-off surrealism painting he did from memory in the midst of his last hospitalization.

31 piece puzzle, watercolour 9 x 12" watercolour paper, December 2024