New York Times, Wednesday, July 28, 2021

ALEX: I'm no art expert, but Jackson Pollock's rule-breaking style seemed like a good excuse to do something different. The first idea I sent to Brad was to have P-A-I-N-Ts appearing diagonally, in random spots, going in all directions. But this was too constraining when constructing the grid. I gave up.

Then we thought about hiding D-R-I-P in some answers going down, but that wouldn't simulate his actual technique: laying the canvas on the floor horizontally, not vertically, and dribbling paint down onto it from above, so it goes in all directions. When we arrived at our final plan, I liked it because it's not common to see words hiding in multiple directions. I wrote a little code to find entries that would interlock in the right places while including P-A-I-N-T going once in each direction. (It seemed important to have each direction represented exactly once, even though doing that to show haphazardness doesn't seem very logical...)

My fantasy was to make it even MORE Pollock-like. If he created a crossword puzzle, would he arrange his theme answers symmetrically? Probably not. Maybe he'd even use a freeform grid. It was fun to think about; maybe the Jackson Pollock of crosswords could pull it off (whoever that is).

BRAD: Pollock's name was enough of a revealer, perhaps, but that 7-letter word in the middle called out for a "bonus" entry. As I recall, we tried a couple of different verbs (SPATTER?) before DRIBBLE really worked.

JACKSON POLLOCK! Neat to see him memorialized in an artistic crossword. I'm usually not a fan of "spaced out circles" themes (Will Shortz isn't either; he finds them random and/or chaotic), but it's an genre for POLLOCK's splatter-painting style.

Wait. DRIBBLE? Further research does show that he indeed used DRIBBLE techniques. Maybe I watched Ed Harris splattering paint over a canvas too many times.

DRIBBLE does fit the orderliness of the P A I N T and T N A I P drips, all going in straight lines. Still, it doesn't do POLLOCK's non-orthogonal work justice. Even though having slanted P A I N T trails would have meant all sorts of grid construction problems — including the big-picture question of what entries are thematic — I'd have preferred something that more represented a POLLOCK creation. I bet that could be pulled off, with enough iteration.

A couple of dribbles in the grid, ACTA crossing ROTI particularly difficult if you don't know your crosswordese or Indian cuisine. Same with ESTER / ITE. We longtime solvers can generally get either without crossings, but something like ESNER (ESNE-esque?) and INE might look just as reasonable.

I love the idea of today's puzzle. Not so much this particular canvas.