Quark Counting His Latinum and Gold — Print & Oil Painting

Light comes through a slatted window at the upper left and lays several hard diagonal bars across the wall, red and dusty. It is the lighting of a back room in a crime film, and it is the only light in the picture.

Below it the table has been arranged as a still life. Rectangular ingots, stacked and scattered; two towers of thin discs; a few loose spheres rolled out to the front edge. One hand slides a folded green banknote in under the palm, while the other is poised over the coins at the far side with the fingertips just touching down.

The figure above the hoard is all appetite. Broad lobed ears set wide, a heavily ridged skull, deep folds bracketing the mouth, small sharp teeth just showing, and both eyes fixed on the money rather than on us. The jacket is a dark quilted green with a gold ornament hanging at the throat, and the paint is smooth and warm throughout, closer to old commercial illustration than to anything screen-made.

There is a good joke buried in the arrangement. Latinum is a liquid, and it is carried inside gold because gold is the one part of that currency nobody wants; a Ferengi surrounded by bars and coins is guarding the packaging. The paper note is worse still, since no Ferengi ledger ever ran on printed promises. Part of our Star Trek collection, and the bar he kept sat on the Promenade of Deep Space 9 Beside the Bajoran Wormhole.