25. StumpCraft retro-reviews
Reviews of four StumpCraft puzzles that I assembled before beginning this newsletter/blog (about 5000 words; 14 images)
This is another “retro-review” post in which I repost updated versions of the reviews I previously posted on Facebook as well as brief newly-written commentaries about earlier puzzles for which I only have only a photo and memories. In this case I have two reviews of each kind for StumpCraft puzzles.
My postings on Facebook were in a private discussion forum called Wooden Jigsaw Puzzles Club that is only be accessed by group members. I recommend joining for up-to-date news and insights by and for wooden puzzle enthusiasts and makers, but I recognize that a Facebook group isn’t for everyone. Also, Facebook’s search capability is – how I can I put this as succinctly but accurately as I can? – the shits! And content in that group cannot be found by people who are googling for information.
My reviews on Facebook began to grow rather too long for that medium, but they were well-received by many people which is what motivated me to begin this newsletter. I wanted a place that was more suitable for my preferred in-depth style of analysis and rambling writing style, and also one in which my essays and reviews would be available to a wider audience, findable with a search engine, and potentially be an information legacy that I can leave behind on the internet long after I am gone. These Substack newsletters and their blog archive are a much better fit.
The repostings of my reviews from Facebook are much the same as when they were originally posted, but I can’t help but to make a few improvements here and there. You can read my general principles for doing so in the introduction here.
My newly written commentaries about the early puzzles tend not to be written like reviews. I remember all of those puzzles fondly but at the time when I assembled them I did not know what to look for. It was only after gaining some experience that I had sufficient standards of comparison and analysis. Puzzle-makers tend to be consistent regarding the quality of their cutting designs and fabrication, so comments made in my later reviews of puzzles made by the same maker regarding those factors tend to be equally valid for them. My posts here may be long and rambling, but I prefer to minimize repetition.
The following reviews are four StumpCraft puzzles that I assembled from January through April 2022 and are in the order that I did them.
Soft Maple in Autumn
Assembly completed January 21, 2022 (no previous written review)
artist – Tom Thomson (1877 – 1917; Toronto, Ontario)
made by StumpCraft (Calgary, Alberta) designer – Jasen Robillard
6½ mm MDF
408 pieces 41cm x 28cm (16” x 11”) average 2.3 cm²/pc
This was just my fourth wooden puzzle and was by far the most challenging one yet. I assembled it right after a fairly easy one and this was the first puzzle that I tried to do without looking at the picture on the box. In doing so I was following Jasen’s suggestion in his FAQ for assembling his puzzles:
In general with my puzzles, I'm using every possible tool at my disposal to make the puzzles interesting, fun, and (yes) challenging. I often end up playing with typical solving strategies and turn them on their head. So tricks in traditional puzzle solving can sometimes turn into traps . . .
. . . Don't use the reference image: your mileage may vary on this one but I generally don't use an image when solving. I find the image gets in the way as you end up often searching the reference image for quite some time trying to find where the piece goes within the frame, rather than using techniques like block to find the pieces that go together. This is often the habit that is hardest to break.
Note that I said I tried to do it without peeking. My puzzle log records that I did resort to peeking at the small image on the end of the box four times, but I can still remember the feeling of satisfaction that I got from using this new (for me) assembly approach for this challenging puzzle. It was indeed a difficult habit to break but I have been doing my puzzles this way ever since.
Besides the feeling of satisfaction that completing a puzzle without assistance gives, it also makes the assembly last longer. Given the price of wooden jigsaw puzzles that is a good thing. I don’t want to finish my puzzles as quickly as possible! Jigsaw puzzling is about the journey, not the destination. Also, it is a good feeling while I am having difficulties to know that if I ever do get truly stuck, rather than giving up from frustration I have the back-up option available of looking at the picture for a clue. But I haven’t even been seriously tempted to peek at a reference picture for the past 40 puzzles now.
This was indeed a challenging puzzle. I said that my previous one (Puzzle Lab’s Island of Elements) had been easy. That was because the image gave lots of clues. This image is quite stingy with them. The light blue of the sky helps, but about three-quarters of the image is in a limited colour palette; they are indeed beautiful shades but they are all mixed together without distinctive regions.
This is one of Jasen Robillard’s first cutting designs, from 2017 the year that he launched StumpCraft and when he was still working out of a home workshop. Even so, his natural talent for cutting design and skill at making silhouettes was already apparent. As I compare this one to his most recent StumpCraft puzzles, including A Different Glory that he designed just a couple of months ago, I can see that his creative skills and bag of tricks have continued to improve over the subsequent years. That is not to say this early one is a poor design: Far from it! It is just that now Jasen has developed to be an industry leader in imaginative and thoughtful cutting designs for laser-cut puzzles.
This was the first puzzle to inspire me to do online research about the artist. I had heard the name Tom Thomson, since he is arguably the most influential artist in Canada’s history, but I wasn’t really familiar with his work. Soft Maple in Autumn was painted on a 10” x 7” piece of plywood. (The actual painting is actually much smaller than this 16” x 11” puzzle.)
It was painted in 1914 in a remote location in Ontario’s Algonquin Park, accessible only by canoe. At the time, Thomson worked in Algonquin Park as a tour guide and it was probably intended to be a sketch for a studio painting. It was in his estate when he died just three years later while canoeing alone on an excursion in the same wilderness area.
Here is the brief introductory summary to a online biography of Thomson written by art historian David P. Silcox (who also wrote a book about him):
Tom Thomson (1877–1917) is one of the greatest artists Canada ever produced, yet much of his life remains shrouded in mystery. He began as an itinerant engraver and after several years emerged as a gifted and innovative painter. This transformation started in 1909, when he found himself surrounded by a group of talented and ambitious artists in Toronto. Although Thomson was older than most of them, he learned quickly and was soon setting an example that surpassed them all. His career as an artist lasted a scant five years, but his legacy endures.
After his death the other artists in his fold took to calling themselves The Group of Seven. Thomson is generally now thought of as having been a spiritual member of that famous group of Canadian post-impressionists, along with their Canadian West Coast counterpart Emily Carr.
Thomson died at the age of forty, just one year after he had found a wealthy patron who enabled him to become a full-time painter working in an artistic style that was still not broadly appreciated in Canada. He had returned to Algonquin Park, no longer as a tour guide but because its forested wilderness was a place that gave him inspiration.
According to The Canadian Encyclopedia:
The circumstances surrounding Thomson’s death have taken on a mythological life of their own. Writers, amateur sleuths and serious scholars have proposed various theories over the years. In a 1977 Toronto Star article, Roy MacGregor suggested that Thomson was murdered . . . MacGregor expanded on this thesis in his 2010 book, Northern Light: The Enduring Mystery of Tom Thomson and the Woman Who Loved Him.
In all likelihood, Thomson’s death was an accident. As David Silcox has argued, “The simplest explanation is therefore likely the correct one — that Thomson stood up in his canoe, lost his balance, and fell. He hit his forehead on the gunwale in the process, knocked himself out, and slipped into the water, where he drowned — as the coroner’s report confirmed.” However, many have found this conclusion difficult to reconcile with Thomson’s reputation as a skilled canoeist and outdoorsman. The exact circumstances of his death may never be known.
Sunset Glow
Assembly completed February 18, 2022 (no previous written review)
artist – Roland Gissing (1895-1967; Okotoks, Alberta)
made by StumpCraft (Calgary, Alberta) designer – Jasen Robillard
6½ mm MDF
490 pieces 30cm x 41cm (11¾” x 16”) average 2.5 cm²/pc
Roland Gissing, the artist who painted this image, was born and raised in England, but images of cowboys and the wild frontier that he saw in the new motion pictures inspired him to move to Alberta at the age of 18. After a short time on a farm learning how to ride and tend a horse he spent ten roving years of doing just that. During his nomadic life he received encouragement and reassurance about his casual sketches from the renowned American cowboy artist Charlie Russell. He decided to settle down and homestead property on the east bank of the Ghost River west of Cochrane, Alberta in the Rocky Mountain foothills.
In addition to the pioneering work of homesteading his land he began to devote more time to his art. Initially Glissing’s favoured media were pastel and watercolour sketches, but in 1930 he began to do oil paintings. Within a few years his paintings of Alberta’s majestic mountains, rolling foothills and ranch-lands began to become very popular and he was able to begin making a comfortable living as a full-time artist.
Gissing painted the image used for this puzzle in 1959 during the later stages of his career after he had re-settled on a ranch in Okotoks about 50 kilometres (30 miles) south of Calgary. I imagine that the scene is a place on his property there. In a “deep dive” about this puzzle on his blog, Jasen Robillard describes the image as “a tranquil forest setting covered in fresh snow, with the magic hour sunset glow casting a hazy golden light on tree branches and the edges of a flowing creek.”
This is another of Jasen Robillard’s early cutting designs from when StumpCraft was in his home-based workshop. He complements the evocative image with whimsies of Gissing’s livestock brand, winter activities, snowflakes, and animals & birds commonly found during the winter in that area.
This puzzle was certainly challenging, but not for the reason that you might think by looking at the seeming-monochrome of the painting. StumpCraft’s UV printing directly onto the medium-density fibreboard shows much more detail of brushstrokes and subtlety in shading than the image conveys. In fact, looking at the fine detail (as we puzzlers are wont to do) the painting seems much more impressionist than it looks on the screen.
Although this is another puzzle from the first year of Stumpcraft, Jasen’s cutting designs were already tricky. But I think the main source of difficulty for me came from its size. This was only my seventh wood puzzle and its nearly 500 piece size was the largest I had yet attempted.
In this case I looked carefully at the image before starting but I did not peek during assembly (not that I wasn’t tempted!) The extent that I enjoyed assembling Sunset Glow is evidenced by the fact that shortly after completing it I bought three more StumpCraft puzzles, including . . .
Bursting Blooms
Originally written and posted March 28, 2022 in the Wooden Jigsaw Puzzle Club
artist – Melissa McKinnon (Calgary, Alberta)
made by StumpCraft (Calgary) designer – Jasen Robillard
6½ mm (1/4”+) MDF (medium density fibreboard)
345 pieces 32cm (12½”) diameter (average 2.3 cm²/pc)
I just completed StumpCraft’s 250 piece Bursting Blooms and it was a delight to assemble. This photo doesn’t do justice to the vibrant colours and brushwork in contemporary Calgary artist Melissa McKinnon’s acrylic painting. But I must admit that I preferred looking more at the closeup seemingly abstract details than the overall composition of the final picture (but that may be just a subconscious bias induced by Springtime hay fever. ;^)
I’ve only been doing puzzles for three months now. While assembling every one of them I have had extended times when I was convinced that pieces were missing and began drafting an e-mail to the company about that. This one was no exception, just like it is also true that every one of my puzzles has turned out to be complete. My brain tells me that missing pieces aren’t likely, but my eyes tell me that the pieces absolutely, certainly, definitely are not there on my board. Does that feeling ever go away? [Update: The consensus of the replies from the Facebook group was that no, that suspicion never does go away: You just learn to dismiss the thought more quickly when it passes through your mind.]
Despite that, I never felt frustrated or annoyed during the occasional long gaps when I couldn’t find anything, nor was I tempted to abandon my intention to do the puzzle no-peek. Great puzzle design! This is the third StumpCraft puzzle I have assembled, and I have three more waiting for me on my shelf.
By the way, I notice that there are no burn marks on the back of StumpCraft puzzles. Is that an indicator of manufacturing quality or are burn marks just incidental and unimportant?
[Update: I have since learned to consider scorching to be an indicator of quality, and a flaw if it is visible on the image side of the puzzle. But I do not think of scorching on the back side to be a flaw and it is common even in puzzles from well-regarded puzzle-makers. In fact, seeing it reminds me that I am now an “insider” who knows about the potential treats that may be awaiting from looking at the back, of which many wooden puzzle fans are unaware. A photo of the back-side of Bursting Blooms was included in my original Facebook posting, but it is at the end of this one after the Spoiler Alert.]
Morning
Originally written and posted April 19, 2022 in the Wooden Jigsaw Puzzle Club
artist – Steve Coffey (Vulcan, Alberta)
made by StumpCraft (Calgary, Alberta) designer – Jasen Robillard
6½ mm (1/4”+) MDF
595 pieces 30cm x 46cm (11¾” x 18”) average 2.3 cm²/pc
StumpCraft sure lives up to its name. I have been stumpified by this one for the past week. Not only is Morning the largest wood puzzle that I have done so far, at nearly 600 pieces, but it also has that wild swirly sky and Jasen Robillard’s tricky cutting. This is the fourth of his puzzles I have done so I knew going in that it would be a real challenge.
This picture was painted by Steve R. Coffey, a musician and artist who lives in Vulcan, Alberta about 135 kilometers (84 miles) along back roads from Calgary (where StumpCraft is located.) This is his impressionist before-sunrise view of the world in which he lives. The sky is afire with glowing light-tinged clouds, and the prairie land in the foreground is a dark reflection of the sky above.
According to Steve’s website: "I'm a sky watcher. I'm a curious onlooker. I study light and the optics of illusion. I love the art of storytelling. I love colour. I'm drawn to patterned intricacies of land and atmospheric abstractions of sky. I'm drawn to the mystery of our own existence somewhere in between.”
From a puzzle-assembly point of view, 90% of this image is like Victorian marbled paper in terms of it being an incoherent realm in which to look for clues. And foolish me, when I bought it two months ago I became determined to assemble it without looking at the picture. I had been saving it until I felt up to the challenge of its 600 pieces and now I felt ready. I must admit that I had a few accidental glimpses of the small picture on the end of the box but I did not study it to plan how to approach assembly.
I tried to begin by starting with the outside perimeter but I should have known from my previous StumpCraft puzzles that Jasen would never allow that to work. It seemed like only about half of the pieces that touch the edge look like edge pieces, and a fair number of the interior pieces looked like edge ones.
Jasen couldn’t do anything about the fact that the bottom fifth of the puzzle is darker than everywhere else, or that the buildings have straight lines that do not appear anywhere else in the image, so the next steps were obvious. Separating the dark pieces and building pieces from the sky ones was much more useful.
Jasen’s cutting made sure that the dark land and buildings were not easy to assemble, but I made satisfying progress and they were good practice for the big swirly sky that I knew loomed ahead. I was able to keep to my intention of not looking at the high-resolution reference image that StumpCraft has available on its website, but it helped that I knew that it wouldn’t have helped much anyways with that sky.
Near the end of the puzzle, when it should have been getting easier, I often thought that there was no way that the squiggly loose pieces in front of me could possibly conform to some of the long smooth curves I saw on the frontiers of the partially assembled puzzle. As with every other wood puzzle I have assembled I felt certain that there must be missing pieces. It seemed obvious what colour and shape of a piece would be needed to fill a void, and I would scan and scan the loose pieces for it to no avail.
(As always, the pieces were all there. Maybe I should learn my lesson, develop some humility, and have less confidence in what a great puzzler I am becoming. But that’s not going to happen! So I’ll just keep enjoying the surprise I feel when the right pieces seem eventually to magically appear, and wonder how they could have evaded my eagle eyes for so long.)
As I write this I am enjoying looking at the backside of the puzzle and seeing multi-piece whimsies that were hinted at by recognizable partial outlines during assembly but which I had forgotten about as those partial-whimsy pieces were finally put into place next to their more obscure counterparts. For example, the face and hat of one fellow was clear, as were his boots, and I recognized the pail as being shaped like a pail, but I had no idea that he was doing until I flipped the puzzle over and discovered a whole cow that I hadn’t known about. [Update: See above photo.] I wasn’t surprised that Jasen had 10 geese flying in a V formation, but it took me a while to figure out who they were following.
The bottom line is that this was a very fun puzzle for me to assemble despite, or more likely, because of my perpetual state of stumpedness. I can easily envision myself doing this one again and again over the years, and I fully expect that every time it will still be a challenge.
Update: In reply to this review Jasen Robillard posted this comment:
Thanks Bill for this great write-up. I love the way you've described both the puzzle and the puzzling experience so accurately. As designer, it's tough for me to fully place myself in the shoes of the solver as there are always certain pieces that have enough familiarity for me to say, for example, "Oh yeah, this belongs somewhere around the top right corner." That said, I appreciate your willingness to stretch into a zone of slight stumpification to discover you had it in you to solve the puzzle all along. :)
Here is my reply to Jasen’s comment:
It is a great puzzle, Jasen, and thank you for introducing me to Steve Coffey as an artist. I appreciate that cutting design itself is an art as well as a skill, and you are very talented at it.
When I am assembling wood puzzles I feel like I am having a personal connection with the designer, like I have been challenged to a competition. In this case, I feel like I won because I enjoyed assembling it and never felt frustrated (although I did have moments of exasperation), and I was able to complete it without having to resort to using the online picture to finish the puzzle.
But I know that you were pulling your punches a bit with this one and that I am not ready (yet!) to take you on when you go full Lotus Kid.
That last comment is a reference to the largest puzzle that StumpCraft has so far released, called We Are the Lotus Kids that has 888 pieces. Also, I no longer think of puzzles as being a competition between me and the designer. An enjoyable experience is a win for both of us, and me giving up in frustration would be a loss for both of us.
Other StumpCraft postings
Decisions, Decisions posted July 29, 2022 reviewed here (Par+StumpCraft)
A Different Glory posted September 17, 2022 reviewed here
Nine mini-puzzles posted October 23, 2023 reviewed here
The History of StumpCraft essay posted Sept 27, 2023 here]
Spoiler alert
Below there are photos that include features in puzzles that some people might prefer to discover for themselves. On the other hand, if your powers of forgetfulness are as good as mine the following content will likely do you no harm. Proceed at your own risk.
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Hi, Bill. i don't personally want to access a group through Facebook, but I enjoy reading your essays, wherever they may have first been posted. I don't think you need to apologize at all for any revising you may do from your original material. I say, "Good for you!". I also don't intend to "follow you" to the land of trying to assemble puzzles without looking at the pictures, but each to his own, of course. Th pictured puzzles that I like best today are "Sunset Glow" and "Bursting Blooms." The puzzle "Morning" and the painting "Moon Song" are two swirly for my taste, though, and give me a dizzy feeling. Today, you've done a good job of revealing characteristics of and thoughts about Stump Craft products—thanks!