I got an e-mail the other day from someone I haven’t heard from in about four months. It was nice to hear from her. She wrote me because she saw a web site that reminded her of me, and she wanted to share it. The guy who made the web site is an artist and a photographer, and he had a funny and slightly odd (but honest enough) idea, which was to just ask people for money, directly, so that he can go do things. In return, the person will get a letter, or a photograph, or a smallish gift, or even one of his art works, in exchange for their patronage.

And his scope is broad, too. If you send him a dollar, he’ll ‘sit in silence and think about you’ for one minute, and if you send him $4,444.00, he’ll go to the island of St. Helena and ‘take a picture of the sky and mail it to you from there. Nothing else.’ Some of his ventures are more altruistic than others, and those are the ones that seem to be the most successful. I mean, if most people have an extra four grand lying around, they’ll take themselves to St. Helena, and take a million pictures of everything, but lots of people like the idea of giving away chocolate chip cookies to strangers. I think it was his idea of buying and handing out copies of the Little Prince outside of the Stock Exchange that reminded my friend of me.

What I love about this idea is its simple ingenuity. He’s very honest about what he’s doing. It seems like he’s a slightly lonely but decent guy, who’s stumbled upon an unusual and cool way to reach out to people, and to do his art at the same time.

So I say gawd bless him. I plan to follow up on him, and I’ll even go so far as to post a link to his page in my blogroll, to make it easier for all of us to chart his progress.

Here’s the link to his page.