This work ends an unfinished project of one of the characters in the novel, LifeaUser’sManual(1978), by French writer Georges Perec. In which one of its protagonists, the millionaire Percival Bartlebooth, puzzle lover, begins a life project: for ten years he learned to paint watercolors of the sea with a teacher, then painting five hundred over the next twenty years (the rate of one every two weeks). He then delivered the watercolors to a specialist jigsaw maker, who transforms and returns them in pieces to be assembled. To leave no trace of his creation, after putting them back together, he deletes them with a solution to make them disappear. Bartle - booth eventually dies blind with a piece of the puzzle in hand, having completed only 438 of the total 500 watercolor jigsaw puzzles.
Méndez Blake concludes Bartlebooth’s project with the remaning 62 watercolors. One for every seascape he ever visited. As an analogy to the story, he too has diluted the watercolors; fading them nostalgically like the character’s memory and sight.
