I spent last year in Rochester NY. Finding the job market sagging I wound up working four jobs. Working sixty to eighty hours a week, leaving little time for painting in my living room, something had to be done.

It was possible to hone my skills doing quick life drawings of all the renters as they waited for their cars to be valet. I drew every square inch of that apartment building�s front entrance, always lit by an army of bulbs, backlit by a wall of mirrors reflecting the light that poured in the two twenty foot floor to ceiling windows. Rocks became my medium when I couldn�t stand to be in the vestibule any longer. I filled mortar joints with mosaics of pebbles, created walls and circles in the gravel, built rock walls and laid flat stones atop them to create small villages in flowerbeds. Alas managers, maintenance men, and of course tenants squashed the valleys of stone.

In the evenings instead of eating dinner with my partner I would drive to various retail outlets to inventory them for five hours and fifty-nine minutes straight. The work was tedious, dusty, dirty, downright depressing, and hell on the body. The old timers at the job caught my attention and so I did some sneak attacks on the job with a disposable point and shoot. This kind of photo tends to really capture the personality, maybe that�s what people find so interesting about tabloids. The off guard photo robs the subject of any chance to alter what is indeed the truth about them at that exact moment in time.

In the spring when the inventory work I had been doing began to slow down I found myself a gardener to supplement the time. My rock fancy grew, larger stones were made available to me and I produced works three feet high at times. None of the pieces I created outdoors in Rochester were documented as the gardens themselves they will go wild flowing along down the stream of life. Life is just that, change it, bend it, stack it, paint it, and who knows you might just see it again one day.

MCS