Food for the soul and medicine for the spirit, Brad.
Food keeps you alive but without art life is just existence.

Art, the embodiment of truth and beauty, is the food that fuels the engine of, not just survival, but Living; living well with energy, optimism and excitement.

Art is the way we document, communicate, codify, interpret, preserve, perpetuate and tell history that we lived and what life meant to us....the only way to pass down to future generations our understanding of life's precious joy the termination of which looms above us all and is carried on the wind through wisps of spring air as a distant drummer in the hush of dawn. The sweet taste is best savored there, at the gateway of oblivion.

My dear wife said it best in one of her poems, which ended with

    "They lived,
    Then they Lived
    Then we lived,
    Then they lived."

The near pessimism of those lines are eclipsed by the cold chills of beauty careening up and down your spine, beating back the cold chills of death.

Art a luxury? I think not!

I would live on peanut butter for a year rather than give up Amour au Papillon, Yseult, Les Bohemiennes or Au Bord du Ruisseau.

When I travel, even the best hotel rooms feel like sensory deprivation, and my wife and daughter always laugh at how I seem to find at least some lovely little work or art which I replace with whatever decrepit image is there on the walls.

Artists! Never doubt that your work is important and that your lives have great meaning. Never worry that your activity is somehow less worthy than those who make our houses or seam our pants or till the soil. Know always with a certainty absolute that your life’s work is sanctified by the heavens, needed equally by those who appreciate and understand and by those who do not.

Fred