Art previously posted here was removed at the request of the copyright holder.
Today is National Lost Penny Day, and I started my online search for art with pennies. I was mostly scrutinizing paintings of fountains, and in my brief quest, I noted that artists who paint fountains seem not to include coins in the water.
This observation led me to the realization that in life, I don’t trust fountains that don’t have at least a few pennies thrown in. Do all the humans who look into that fountain lack the urge to make a wish, express a hope, dream the impossible? That fountain must have an off-putting vibe.
If you find a penny, do you pick it up? I do. I have great affection for the simple penny and oh, my, the places it may have been and the hands that might have held it. A penny is full of endless stories and connections.
I say a penny is never lost, merely on a journey we don’t know about… And just like that, a character is tapping on my brain.
I felt wishful as well, though I never really personified the coins in the water. I play games with coins and arrange them into bigger shapes like plants, buildings, faces, etc. But, I have never really thought about a journey of a coin unless it’s well battered or corroded or the year was significant to me in some way. I wanted to collect the state quarters, but then they expanded to anything quarters and that was the end of collecting. Some of the anything quarters have worthwhile stories just by what they pictorially represent, so those became more worthwhile to hold onto. Otherwise, quarters were worth more than dollars when they did laundry or made phone calls or magically became candy and soda.
I googled art made of pennies and found a lot of interesting sculptures and other things. One time Tim was going to cover his bathroom floor with pennies (when we were all at The Compound), but the project stopped before he finished. Now I’ve seen a lot of penny-covered floors, and they’re quite beautiful.
And, a lot of work! It reminds me of *Batteries not Included (I think that was the movie) where the apartment entrance was slowly being retiled with those mosaic small squares, and one day they are magically done. The small now apartment building surrounded by sky scraper towers.
My mom thinks the same about how beautiful they look and she wanted to do her bathroom floor that way, but they eventually settled on new floor tiles. Some of the prints on the tile look like faces in mountain rock without the mountains.
Fun fact. I don’t think I ever saw *Batteries Not Included, but I heard parts of it many, many times, because when Lynne’s son Jess was a child, it was his favorite movie. It was often playing in the next room while I sat at the dining room table and tapped out novels on my old, wee Macintosh computer.