Simpler Times

If I find a jigsaw I have enjoyed doing, I like to find out about the artist. 

This one, which I bought from Barney’s Newsbox in Grasmere before Christmas, intrigued me. I did not know what a Grist Mill was and found it was a watermill found in the past in America, grist being an early settler word for cereal grains, and of course leading to the phrase ‘grist to the mill’ - something useful or with profit potential. I did not know what Pumpkin Butter was and it turns out to be a spread made from . . . pumpkins. 

The artist was Sharon Ascherl from Maryland. She paints and sells Folk Art pictures - see here for a range of her work. All her pictures look back at the past and evoke a time when life was supposedly simpler (the jigsaw is one of a range called ‘Simpler Times’), friendlier and somehow lovelier. I like the world that she paints, full of nostalgia for life in more genial times in the past. However, there is of course an element of rose-tinted spectacles in such a view of the past. But at least it would seem it was always either sunny or snowy, never damp, dreary and dark as it is with us here at the moment. But then such days don’t really make good pictures or jigsaws! 

The jigsaw was made in New Zealand. So - a puzzle made in New Zealand, from a painting by an American artist, and sold in Ambleside. I like that.