Guillemot with Egg (Art Puzzle)

Title: “Guillemot with Egg (Art Puzzle)”

Life-sized handmade solid oak jigsaw puzzle (Limited Edition of 6)

Guillemot with Egg (Art Puzzle): Full image
59cm (H) x 42cm (W) x 4.4cm (depth) @ 8kg weight
Solid European Oak, hand-cut, hand-engraved, art puzzle
with inset full-size replica guillemot egg.

Guillemot with Egg in artist’s dining room (click on image to see artists’ home studio, workshop, and gallery).

First and foremost I want to mention that the eggs used in my work are not real – for obvious ethical reasons (it is also illegal to take wild birds eggs). They are life-size replicas made of a plaster resin composite and hand-painted – not by me, but by a very reputable leading replica birds eggs maker.

“Limited Edition” of 6

The phrase limited edition in this case is a bit of a misnomer. These are all individually handmade by me from my original design. I really wish there was, but unfortunately there is no mechanical or chemical process by which these can be reproduced – like screen printing, lithographs, card puzzles (using a die and jigsaw puzzle press), etc.

I never intended to make this jigsaw puzzle myself! I researched for weeks into using CNC (Computer Number Controlled) engineering techniques, laser, and waterjet cutting. For my puzzle design I wanted 1 ½” – 2” (40 – 50mm) thick oak wood, and I wanted the thickness of the wood cut to be less than 1mm – ideally about ½mm. I realised that CNC would not work because the drill bits would be too weak to cut that deep – something less than 1mm to cut through very hard oak nearly 2” deep using side pressure alone – no way.

I don’t like the idea of laser cutting because it burns and leaves the edges of the cuts black – something very unappealing – and very un-puzzle like! Indeed there is a very real risk that a wooden puzzle this thick could catch fire if cut by laser!

For a long time I thought I had found the solution in waterjet cutting. From fairly extensive research I believed it could have a cutting width of about ½mm. So I went ahead and designed the most intricate puzzle drawing – down to about 1mm curves and circles! I thought I could use shallow cut lines to show extra detail – like a drawing or carving on top of a puzzle – and full cut-through lines obviously for the jigsaw puzzle pieces. I, extremely naively, thought all I had to do was to supply the design to a waterjet cutting company and they would do the rest! And I could have hundreds produced. If only…!

What I don’t want is to have just one of these. I want one for myself and I need to make a living… I have invested a considerable amount of time and effort into this and would like to be able to continue to create work of this standard or better.

At the moment I am not famous enough to make and sell just one of these and earn enough money to make it worth my while – so I have to make a few. Six feels like a reasonable compromise – and not so many that I become a sweatshop jigsaw maker…!

Birds

My love of birds dates back to my mid-teens – after a new boy arrived at school whom I befriended and who happened to be a “twitcher” (a fanatical bird ticker-off-er!). I went with him on many trips and continued my interest after we went our separate ways (we went to different universities to study different subjects). As time has gone by, I have become more and more enthralled by bird’s beauty, abilities, resilience, and tenacity. I have photographed birds, filmed them (I built a special camera incorporating a telescope specifically for this purpose and I built a bird hide in my garden!), recorded their sounds with and without film (see my YouTube video channel – https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCcNBRvK_RcVoj6WFm2z8GRg), and have painted some.

As an artist I realise I can’t compete with photography (including film) in terms of capturing the beauty and detail of birds, and I don’t want to even try to compete with the likes of Audubon and other great bird artist and illustrators (Peter Hayman for example). However, I have been hoping to do something different and personal with them – something that I hope will show off some of their majesty, beauty, surroundings, habitat – and hopefully to do them justice.

Chunky Wood Jigsaw Puzzles

My interest in chunky wooden puzzles (well over an inch thick and that can stand up on their own) arose from a simple tree puzzle I stumbled on in a Swiss airport souvenir shop about twenty years ago. (When I travel I like to buy at least one nice item of art from the country.) I loved it’s smoothness, heaviness, tactileness, simplicity, beauty, and it’s differentness. It was expensive (about an average person’s day’s pay (£200 in today’s money)), but I just had to have it. I still have it to this day. I also just love solving puzzles of any kind. I liked the way the tree puzzle had unexpected shapes – that, when taken out of context, you had no way of knowing what part of the tree they occupied! About two years ago (2018) I had the idea of trying to design and make my own wooden puzzles and started to look into how to make them and to see what others had done…

M.C. Escher Influence

About two years ago I had the idea of trying to design and make my own puzzles. This coincided with my renewed interest in M.C. Escher’s work. As an artist, I don’t want to copy anyone and wondered if I could blend my interest in chunky wooden puzzles with Nature – and include ideas that fascinate me – like camouflage – particularly shape and textural camouflage – and the geometry of the line… I share this interest of the line with Escher, and he has most definitely inspired me.

Lines

For most practical purposes the visual world consists entirely of coloured dots (or pixels). Lines are a fundamental visual unit. They are a two-sided shape. (We can’t see a one-sized shape because it would have no length or depth – and so it is invisible.) Even a dot is a line – albeit a very short one! A triangle is obviously three lines, and all 2 & 3D shapes can be made from triangles. A square is four lines (or two triangles), and a circle is a line that changes direction in a precise and regular way. A circle is also an infinite number of very narrow triangles (I deduced a formula for pi from this simple idea as a mathematical thought experiment/exercise many year ago). 2D becomes 3D by simply adding the height dimension in the form of lines or triangles sticking out from a flat shape. But the central raw material for any shape is always the line.

What have lines got to do with puzzles? Well they are the cuts in the wood and any additional detail in the form of those that appear in the picture the puzzle is printed on, or any carved lines on the puzzle. My main interest is to only use lines – cut or carved – in my puzzles – as opposed to conventional puzzles where an image stuck to wood or board is cut with a puzzle cutter (known as a puzzle dye).

Boundaries

Real things have boundaries. In a sense that is what makes them a thing. An apple is a plump, sphere-like collection of organised cells with an outer red, green, or red and greed outer skin. We can see the apple because we have learned that a tennis-ball sized smooth green, red, or green and red thing is very likely to be an apple. It’s not just its’ colour that is key to our identifying it, it is it’s shape or boundary as well. We would not think that a sheet of apple-coloured paper or item of clothing was an apple – we might say it is apple-coloured – but that is not sufficient to categorised it as an apple. Likewise, we would not think that an outline of an apple was an apple if it didn’t look three-dimensional and wasn’t apple coloured.

Lines and Perception

Lines are the primary means by which we detect or perceive things. In Nature or reality there are very few actual lines – as in a thin strip of different colour or shade compared to the background – i.e. a simple pencil line. From a distance a tree without leaves can look like a series of lines. And the horizon between sea and sky can look like a line. A line can simply be a colour change boundary. A green leaf against a blue sky (or any other colour sky) can be thought to have a line around the edges of the leaf. But green leaves against other green leaves still have a boundary – or lines – because there is a perceptible difference between them. In fact it is fair to say that if there isn’t a perceptible difference between two edges then there is no line. If we were to put a cut-out of a green leaf onto an exact same green piece of paper it would appear to disappear.

Animal senses seem pre-disposed to detecting changes or boundaries. Visually that means detecting colour boundaries and movement (movement is just changes in colour boundaries over time). This is what vital to animals’ survival. The things that matter to them have to be detected and acted on. Changes in the animals’ visual environment can mean a threat – like a predator or dangerous boundary – like a cliff or fire – or simply something to avoid – like not to walk or run into. Other changes in the animal’s environment can be positively sough after – like food, a mate, somewhere to safe shelter and sleep.

Eyes have evolved to convert a vast stream of a narrow spectrum of electromagnetic radiation into a stream of real-time pixelated colour data to the brain from coloured rays of light. Light from the animal’s environment enters through the cornea (lens) and excites the rods and cones in the retina – which in turn transmit electro-chemical signals about the light rays to the visual cortex and beyond into other parts of the brain. But it is the mind that makes sense (pun intended) of all this data. The mind seems predisposed to “see” patterns and forms – especially from boundaries – because these are highly suggestive of something different and potentially important and/or useful.

Visual perception is an amazing feat of form recognition from lines and colours (texture as well – but this is a form of line and/or colour). This incredible capability can sometimes be mistaken but my interest is to highlight this by having some fun with it. We “see” elephants in the sky, horses in the sea, etc. – but of course no such things exist!

The brain is always looking for patterns to match up with its growing database to quickly identify things in the environment.

A line (or boundary) can be represented as something drawn – what I call a positive line (because something has been deliberately added) – or is can be a cut or carved – what I call a negative line. A line is anything that shows a boundary (including simply a colour change).

I decided to have some fun with this puzzle. With just cuts and carved lines I wanted to capture a busy seabird colony with a life-sized guillemot (Uria aalge) as the central focus. I mixed carving and cuts because if everything was a cut the pieces would be too small and would be nearly impossible to make them to join together – as real puzzle pieces – i.e. with interlocking lugs.

Art (Jigsaw) Puzzle

What is a jigsaw puzzle? Classical wooden/cardboard jigsaw puzzles are usually pictures cut up into small interlocking pieces – where the puzzle is more of a challenge or exercise, and the picture is the end goal. So in a sense the puzzle is a journey and the picture is the destination. In my case, in the case of this work, the puzzle is both the journey and the destination. The puzzle is the picture.

Classical wooden/cardboard jigsaw puzzle pieces usually have two to four structurally interlocking lugs to hold it together. The number of lugs usually depends on where the piece is: corner pieces usually interconnect with two other pieces, the side pieces usually interconnect with three other pieces; and the inside pieces usually interconnect with up to four other pieces.

This work is a jigsaw puzzle within a jigsaw puzzle.

It is in part a camouflaged jigsaw puzzle. It starts at the right more or less as a conventional puzzle (the “cliff”) – albeit I’m using the size and angle of the pieces as a perspective device – but as the scene progresses to the left I slowly morph the puzzle shapes into natural shapes (animals, fish, waves, etc) to camouflage the lines of the puzzle pieces themselves.

I use a plethora of shapes and sizes of puzzle pieces and lug and devices – and many decoys and deflections – to make a picture-less jigsaw puzzle naturalistic and fun…! :)

Guillemots

All birds are amazing, but guillemots (Uria aalge) are among the most amazing. The Guillemot chick’s first and only time of leaving the “nest” – a few square inches of bare rock(!) where it’s parents incubated it on their feet – could be as much as a 300m plunge off the ragged cliff edge – into the sea (hopefully!). The chick can “fly” on this maiden voyage, but obviously they are not proficient, and it is more of a clumsy glide. Often it is not a straight flight/glide into the sea. If the chick crashes into rocks before it reaches the sea – and if it survives that – it has to navigate over what is often very hostile terrain – and it may encounter predators en route to the sea – where it’s parents will be calling from. A small chick can be quite feisty and hold it’s own against common predators like artic fox (but many do fall prey).

East coast of the UK Guillemot chicks, if and when they reach the sea on their maiden flight, swim with their parents all the way to Norway – a considerable task in and of itself.

Other fascinating facts about guillemots. They are one of the few animals that can inhabit land, air, sea surface, and underwater (a bit of a misnomer?!). They can swim underwater practically as well as they can fly in the air – and that means they can swim as well as most fish! Indeed they swim after fish to catch them – this is their primary source of food. It could be said that they fly underwater. They can dive up to 150m – indeed the deepest known dive by any bird is Brünnich’s guillemot (Uria lomvia) at 210m!

The Life-sized Guillemot

Why life-sized? I have a penchant for life-sized natural history art because it does the subject justice, it is honest, and most people don’t know the size of many animals because they never get close enough to them. Perhaps a better question is: why not life-sized…?

Working journey of the making of the main guillemot jigsaw piece…

The guillemot is not painted. I love oak – and wood in general – and think it sacrilegious to paint it. I only allowed myself to use a light and a dark wood stain to achieve the hopefully realistic coloured effect of the main bird. The whole work has had two coats of Danish oil to bring out the wood grain, give it a warmth, and to give it protection. It should last hundreds, if not thousands, of years…

Another challenge was to try to capture the smoothness and aerodynamism of this most perfect of birds – supremely designed for flight in the air and flight “under” water. I hope that by placing the main guillemot in the centre of the jigsaw puzzle as single smooth life-sized piece among dozens of other smaller pieces – accentuates it’s majestic shape and form…

I had a eureka moment for the eye (albeit after thinking about it for days!). A key visible feature of any animal are it’s eyes. They give so much of the essence of the personality and behaviour of the animal, they give it life and vitality. I thought long and hard how I could bring my guillemot life – and am extremely pleased with the solution I came up with.

The Embedded Life-size Egg

Birds eggs are extraordinarily beautiful, the shells are extremely strong (relative to the amount of material they consist of), and they are amazingly complex, but highly functional, creations that have their own lifecycle and incredible journey. For example, when the shell-less egg growing inside the parent reaches full size the hard shell is slowly secreted around it from calcium carbonate (CaCO3) crystals from the parent (who has to have enough of this in their diet otherwise the eggs will be soft and break).

Eggs have a complex structure, but obviously the main function is to protect and facilitate the growth and birth of a young bird. All the nutrients the growing foetus requires are contained within the egg, however, the egg has to be strong enough to protect the embryo through all the knocks and bumps – and being stood or sat on by the parents; it has to be porous to allow oxygen in and carbon dioxide (poisonous waste) out; and has to protect from bacterial infection. If the egg is laid, and spends time, on bear rock– as is the case with guillemots – then the shells have to be particularly strong. However, near the time of hatching an amazing metamorphosis takes place: the embryo absorbs some of the calcium of the eggshell to form an egg tooth. This is a double strategy to help the young emerge from the shell: after the shell has fulfilled it’s purpose it is weakened by the young bird absorbing some of it, and at the same time the young bird gains a sharp hard tool by which to chop itself out.

The blunt end of the egg is the weaker part of the egg (that is due to mechanical geometric properties: the shallower the curve the weaker it is). The embryo’s position in the egg seems designed to exploit this weakness when it comes to hatching. The orientation of the developing embryo is such that the legs are usually at the “pointed” end and the head is usually at the “blunt” end – so the head is in the ideal position to start the hatching in what is obviously a very tight space…

With the main interest of this work being a life-sized guillemot in it’s busy natural surroundings, and working with thick oak, it occurred to me from the outset of this long project that I could incorporate a life-size egg into the design somewhere. I bought some eggs to test the idea and after several trials I worked out how I could do it.

Eggs are generally developed in the parent “pointed” side down and are rotated prior to laying so they emerge “blunt” side first. It seems unclear why this is so, but I wanted to highlight this phenomenon in the work.

I wanted to create a mystery of how the egg got into the body of the guillemot – and how it comes out – hence I made the egg opening (front and back) smaller than the egg itself – with no way for the egg to have got in or out… The Guillemots’ eggs are relatively large in proportion to the mother’s size, and I wanted to highlight the fact that the mother has to fly and dive with this huge thing inside her abdomen. I have made a guestimate of where the egg would be in the mother (which, as mentioned above, has to be turned in situ before it is laid).

Full-size egg inside the main Guillemot puzzle piece

Epilogue

It has been an enormous relief to finish this work(!) – so much so that I needed a few days to recuperate. The intense concentration and sheer physical effort in handling this 8kg block of solid oak wood for highly accurate cutting through the most intricate and precise twists and turns – has taken it’s toll on my arms, back, eyes, and brain. (It measures 59cm x 42cm x 4.4cm thick. This work is two pieces of oak I have hopefully invisibly joined. I would have used one piece if I could have sourced such a wide piece of oak.)

Design – 6 weeks (plus many tests, trials and errors!) over a 16 months period; carving the approximately 2mm deep detail black “lines” – four days; cutting the 44mm (1 ¾”) deep oak jigsaw pieces – 4 days – both with a full face mask most of the time and with the noise of an air filter (industrial hoover) running all the time (I used ear plugs); 1 day to carve out the egg opening and incorporate the full-size egg into the body of the main central guillemot (and the stress and strain associated with that!); 1 day finishing – this included rounding off jigsaw pieces (front), sanding (back), and applying finishing oil to all the convoluted surfaces; 1 day framing.

This project started back in September 2018 and finished (under a great deal of time pressure (largely due to the non-arrival of a faster-cutting fret saw ordered on 3^rd January)!) on 17^th February 2020 – just in time for submission to the 2020 Royal Academy Summer Exhibition…

Videos of work being made