New York Times, Tuesday, January 8, 2019

After seeing a Kandinsky painting one day, I wondered if I could also build an abstract crossword "work of art" using shape/ color elements. I quickly settled on the idea of using entries that are not normally treated as colored elements to be re-interpreted literally as such. Although the finished ABSTRACT ART will probably never hang in a museum anywhere, I hope that it's fun to check out and solve nevertheless.

As a fun aside, I did come across this crossword museum piece recently however: 91-year-old woman fills in crossword at museum — only to discover it was a £60,000 artwork. Come to think of it; perhaps Will should start a crossword museum somewhere?!

With seven themers, it was a hard slog trying to get a clean fill, leading to numerous revisions in the "product development cycle" with Will and Sam, who were admirably patient with me. It was a good call from them not to settle though, to get to a more polished final product. With so much material already, I regrettably had to dispense with one of my comic book favorites: GREEN ARROW. Moving along in the DC Comics universe, we have instead actors KEATON [23A], and my favorite non-theme entry in the whole puzzle - GAL GADOT [2D/51D]. There's definitely some fanboy appreciation at work there...

The editing of the puzzle made clues generally tighter and better, though the original trickier clues for the theme entries (e.g. "American recorder?" for BLACKBOX and "Mark on a beach bum?" for TANLINE) were made more straightforward for a Tuesday audience.

Constructor's logs: Submitted Oct 2017, revised Feb 2018 after "liked the idea but needs changes," with acceptance in May subject to fill clean-up, and final version in July 2018 after numerous iterations.

You ever read "Olivia"? It's a cute picture book series about a high-energy piglet who gets into all sorts of trouble. In one scene, she goes to a museum with her mom and spots a Jackson Pollock. I don't get it, she thinks. She then proceeds to splatter paint on the walls of her bedroom. It's art!

I'm with Olivia, especially when it comes to ABSTRACT ART. (Not so much when it comes to paint on bedroom walls.) Isn't it just a bunch of RED SQUAREs, BLACK BOXes, GOLD RINGs … selling for millions of dollars?

I'm apparently in the wrong business.

I liked that Freddie packed in a whole bunch of colorful shapes, making the grid feel like it was an actual piece of ABSTRACT ART. Some compromises — the outdated TREO forced by the overlap of GOLD RING and ABSTRACT ART for example — but I think they're reasonable prices to pay to achieve the desired effect.

Loved the clue for EGGS: a [Baker's dozen?] would make a lot of cake! More amusement in the clue for EROS, who literally takes a bow (and arrow).

I might have put this one up for a POW! if I appreciated art a little more. Now, if we only had a real art aficionado here at XWI …