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Artist: Keitha McClocklin Puzzle Design: Siri Olson Dimensions: 27.5 cm x 27.5 cm Piece Count: 333 Difficulty: 5 out of 5 "It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye." - Antoine de Saint Exupéry, The Little Prince |
Table of Contents
About the Artist: Keitha McClocklin
Award-winning Canadian artist Keitha McClocklin is known for her abstract realism style that blends painting, printmaking, and drawing. Her work is characterized by layers, vibrant colors, and mixed media like pastel, ink, acrylic, cold wax, and oil. Fluidly shifting between figurative, landscape, and abstract compositions, Keitha’s art is informed by her deep understanding of art history, math, and grids.
Keitha’s studio in Saskatoon’s Riversdale neighbourhood serves as the creative space for her eclectic artistic journey. Her family roots stretch across Canada, from New Brunswick to Manitoba, British Columbia, Ontario, and Saskatchewan.
Links
Keitha McClocklin's Studio Website
Wikipedia entry on Antoine de Saint Exupéry
Lost in the Stars - New Yorker Article
Saint Exupéry's Letter to a Hostage (1943)
Sonder - from the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows
n. the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own—populated with their own ambitions, friends, routines, worries and inherited craziness—an epic story that continues invisibly around you like an anthill sprawling deep underground, with elaborate passageways to thousands of other lives that you’ll never know existed, in which you might appear only once, as an extra sipping coffee in the background, as a blur of traffic passing on the highway, as a lighted window at dusk.
Siri's Puzzle Design Notes
A seed’s most important growth happens invisibly beneath the soil: roots reaching down and branching outwards, long before there’s any visible stem. It's similar with children. The ‘growing up’ that adults often praise is the visible part, but the downward and outward growth (security, curiosity, a sense of ground under them) is what makes the upward growth possible at all.
“What is essential is invisible to the eye.”
This idea shows up again and again in the book The Little Prince, and I utilized that message as the lens through which to view the story. It fits well with the analogy of a seed, reinforcing the truth that even if you’re grown up, it’s the hidden growth that is essential.
Keitha McClocklin painted the fox and named him Antoine, a nod to the book's author. This small tribute is easy to miss, which is fitting for a piece so much about what you don't see at first.
I first read the book in a high school French class, and even then, one detail stuck with me; the cover said, “written and illustrated by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.” One person. Two jobs.
The book itself is partly about that exact thing. The narrator's opening memory is of drawing a boa constrictor that had swallowed an elephant, showing it to adults, and being told to put the crayons away and focus on something practical instead. The whole story is, in a way, about refusing to let that kind of imagination get snuffed out, so Saint-Exupéry reclaiming this lost creativity and illustrating it himself feels significant to me. I also spent a solid chunk of that semester trying not to misspell his last name in every essay I turned in, so the name itself was already familiar to me long before this puzzle was.
I wanted the puzzle design to make you think along the same lines the book’s main idea: give you a picture of what’s happening, then hide layers beneath it, leaving you wondering if you got the point. The puzzle image may seem straightforward–a fox sitting in the grass–but as you build, you’ll likely get lots of time to spend looking at the fox, while the tricky foliage figures itself out. The background wasn't made harder for the sake of being hard. I deliberately repeated similar leaf shapes and relied more on colour and texture than obvious piece silhouettes because I wanted the slower part of the solve to mirror the slower parts of the story. You could even listen to the audiobook while you build; however, reading this story will likely take much less time than solving the puzzle!
The landscape cutline at the bottom of the puzzle is a reference to the book's final scene: the simple hills with a single star above them, where the Little Prince returns home. It's the one image the book shows twice, which felt like reason enough to build the whole design on top of it. Every time I’ve read this book, I leave off wonderfully confused, with many things open to interpretation, trying to ‘fit’ the narrative into something concrete. But I think the true message of the story isn’t something you’re supposed to land on. It’s something you’re meant to keep noticing differently, which is maybe the most honest thing a children’s book about growing up could do. That’s why there are whimsies of a kid and a grown-up reading on opposite sides of the puzzle. Same book, different perspectives. The child lies on their stomach, closer to the ground. The grown-up sits upright. It felt like a quiet echo of the book itself, where children often notice what adults overlook.
The fox teaches that taming something makes you responsible for it, forever. Relationships aren't built instantly, and they're created through small, repeated acts of attention. That's exactly what I hope the puzzling asks of you too. A star means something different once you've tamed something, because it can hold someone you care about. But a constellation is more than one star. It's a whole collection of the things you hold close. So here, the Little Prince, the messenger of the story, is the one depicted as that constellation, hidden within the puzzle. It's another version of the same motif the book keeps circling back to: what's essential here isn't visible either. You have to go looking for it, the same way you'd have to go looking for a star that only means something because of who it reminds you of. And it's rarely just one star. The Little Prince has his rose, but he's also responsible for his planet, the fox, and the baobabs he has to keep pulling up before they take over. Taming one thing seems to open you up to caring for a whole set of things, all needing that same quiet attention.
My stars are my cats. I see them clearly in the fox's gaze. Everyone who builds this puzzle will likely have a different tie to it. No two people are looking at the same sky. My essential is someone else's invisible.
In the end, the puzzle only becomes whole the same way the book’s relationships do. Not all at once, but through the time and attention you’re willing to give it.
Whimsy List
4x Mushrooms
3x Pencils
2x Foxes
2x Caterpillars
Sheep
Lamppost
Plane
Elephant inside boa
Star
Seed
Kid Reading
Grown-Up Reading
Snake
Rose
Baobab
Asteroid B-612
Little Prince
Old Shell
Squirrel
Hidden Secrets
Clue 1: Secret Image
Clue 2: Puzzle Map
