This one is crying to be made into a painting ten feet high. Alas, it would need to be photoreal, and none of that Giclée stuff either; that’d be cheating. If fifty grand fell out of the sky into my lap I’d quit my job and spend a year on the project. That’s unlikely to happen, since when I sit outside I’m usually at a picnic table, and if the shade tree didn’t stop the 50 Gs in its tracks, the top of the table would. But it is a nice dream.

This brings up the subject of Patronage and Grants. In his landmark novel Stranger In a Strange Land, Robert A. Heinlein had his Wise Old Owl character Jubal Harshaw yell, “A government-supported artist is an incompetent whore!” I read Stranger more than forty years ago, when I was wet behind the ears and impressionable, but I shouldn’t have taken RAH’s word for it; after all, both Leonardo and Michelangelo enjoyed the patronage of Lorenzo “Il Magnifico” de’ Medici, and if he wasn’t The Government, who was? (Pope Julius? Well, yeah, but “in addition to” not “instead of.”)

So far the only people to buy my artworks or otherwise give me money to create have been private parties. But I did apply for a grant once, so this is no sanctimonious testimonial. And my hero Kurt Vonnegut wrote Slaughterhouse-Five “on Guggenheim money (God love it).”

As for the image, and why the tenors and the eggs and the lock, and why the Spoon is All-Important, not to mention the torn envelope, which wasn’t mentioned, I’m of the opinion that the story the viewer creates of this concatenation stands a good chance of being better than the story I would tell about it.

Support the Arts, folks!