HOMAGE TO RENE MAGRITTE: I would like to do with a photograph what Magritte did with paint and canvas. The artist was a photographer as well as a painter, but it was in paintings that he put objects where they clearly don’t belong, or he deliberately left out something in a portrait that belongs there... like his own head in a self-portrait. He often said that he considered his paintings to be a “defiance of common sense.” I am drawn to Magritte’s paintings perhaps because I like the idea of defying common sense. One of the ways to state the importance of common sense is to defy it. It’s a dangerous business, so one has to be very careful. Deliberately defying common sense in art is very different from stupidly defying it the way John Edwards and Dominique Strauss-Kahn and Anthony Weiner did it.

This morning I noticed a lemon in the fruit bowl on our table that was already defying common sense in size and shape, so I tried to think of how I could use it in a photograph. I remembered a photograph of the beach I took in Coronado on Sunday when I went over to watch my friend Tom Fagan paint a wedding, so I decided to see what would happen if I put the lemon on the beach. There is a wedding taking place at the bottom left corner of the picture... not Tom’s wedding, but a simple, obviously low-cost affair. (The extravagant wedding Tom was painting on the back lawn of the Hotel del Coronado was said to cost $250,000.) In my photograph there is an airplane up to the left of the lemon. A guy on the beach at the bottom of the lemon seems to be getting ready to bat it the way a volley ball is returned. Cabrillo Point is prominent in the background. The sky has in it some Magritte clouds... and there are sailboats.