Who would have thought that jigsaw puzzles could be so cool? A Washington artist named Tim Klein has used a unique quirk of the puzzle industry to make one-of-a-kind surrealist images — and people love them.
“Jigsaw puzzle companies tend to use the same cut patterns for multiple puzzles,” Klein said. “This makes the pieces interchangeable. As a result, I sometimes find that I can combine portions from two or more puzzles to make a surreal picture that the publisher never imagined.”
Klein wasn’t the first to take note of the interesting quirk.
Back in 1988, he read about art professor Mel Andriga, who had noticed that puzzle companies use the exact same mold to cut out all their puzzles. The result? Combining multiple puzzles to make bizarre or interesting images.
“I take great pleasure in ‘discovering’ such bizarre images lying latent, sometimes for decades, within the pieces of ordinary mass-produced puzzles,” Klein said. “As I shift the pieces back and forth, trying different combinations, I feel like an archaeologist unearthing a hidden artifact.”
Klein’s reinvented puzzles look like they came straight from the 20th century’s surrealist painter era.
He manages to combine landscapes, animals, and more. Some of them are beautiful. Others are just downright bizarre.
Klein’s puzzle designs don’t require any special materials. He uses mass-produced jigsaw puzzles and plays around until he finds a design that works. The artist says he loves it.
It might seem like combining puzzles is simplistic, but there’s actually a lot of thought that goes into Klein’s work.
One of his most famous pieces, entitled “Metamorphosis (Enlightenment),” is a combination of three vintage puzzles.
“In the original image, the statue rests on a dark rocky pedestal visible all along the bottom edge of the puzzle,” Klein said. “I found that although my two copies of the Kuan-Yin puzzle shared the same cut pattern, they had been run through the die-cutting machine at right angles to each other. This enabled me to eliminate the pedestal from the image by replacing one Kuan-Yin puzzle’s bottom edge with pieces from the left-hand edge of the other Kuan-Yin puzzle.
“Then, by swapping in pieces from the maze puzzle, I gave Kuan-Yin some butterfly wings. The subtitle ‘Enlightenment’ refers not only to the Buddhist principle of enlightenment but also to the fact that I’ve ‘lightened’ a big heavy statue and given her flight.”
Now, people are starting to take notice of Klein’s unusual artistic endeavors. And the internet loves them, too.
It’s working out pretty well for Klein, who has sold some of his puzzle mashups for up to $650.
Some of his other puzzles have been featured at art galleries, such as the Splendorporium Gallery in Portland, Oregon. His website also notes that he’s completely sold out of all his artworks at the moment.
Klein prefers to work with vintage puzzles for the effects he’s looking for. He finds his puzzles at thrift stores and garage sales. He says modern jigsaw puzzles tend to be visually busy and constructed with Photoshop. He likes to work with older puzzles that depict a single, classic image.
While he’s scouting out more art, he’s also planning to publish a book or a calendar featuring a collection of his puzzle combinations. He also says he loves public speaking and is interested in giving talks about the kind of work that he does and the art of puzzle mashups.
Jigsaw puzzles have been around since the middle of the 16th century.
Originally, they were wood cuttings that depicted maps and were intended to teach children geography. More than 200 years later, we still use puzzles as educational toys, making them one of the most widely known educational playthings in history.
They weren’t considered entertainment for adults until the turn of the 20th century when puzzles for grown-ups came on the market. Within a decade, people went crazy for them, turning jigsaw puzzles into a highly popular source of entertainment.
Puzzles in those days were much harder than they are today, though. For one thing, the pieces didn’t fit together. You needed to just lay them side by side. This meant that one unfortunate moment could undo everything. There were also no pictures on the outside of the box to guide you, and titles sometimes were intentionally confusing. People didn’t know what the final result would be until they got there.
Klein’s new puzzle mashups would undoubtedly be popular among the puzzle enthusiasts of the early 1900s.
The artist has taken an old hobby and reimagined it for the modern world. Some of his images might make you laugh at first — but there’s a deeper meaning behind them designed to make you think.
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