I’ve painted over 800 rocks and placed them in the city. I stopped numbering them on the back in the seven hundreds, and I’d always done small unnumbered ones. In truth if it was a cool thousand I wouldn’t be at all surprised.
One day maybe a decade ago I got tired of waiting for spring.
Deep in dark December, I started finding rocks under the trees, scrubbing them, giving them a few coats of white, and painting them colors. I don’t think it was a plan to hold back so many rocks for one big outlay, I just kept making them and thinking that the time wasn’t right to say goodbye to them. I held on to them into March.
A day came when air is warm but the world is still grey, like it got beat up by winter and is way worse for the wear, and I told the family, “It’s time to rock and roll,” and we put them all out. All four of us, making a bunch of trips in the night.
The next day I’m still putting a few out and when a thin young man sees me and says, “Did you… are you..?”
“Yes,” I say half sheepishly, half foxily.
“Thank you,” he says, his voice full of emotion.
A woman nearby overhears and asks, “Can I give you a hug?” That hug still means the world to me. A stranger hug in NYC!
If grown people like the rocks, they are like super fun candy for children. First of all, kids are often the first to notice them, and they have the fun of saying, “Mom, look at this.” They stand there talking about them for a few minutes until a parent pulls them along, only to find another painted rock in the next tree bed and then again a few trees down. I had two long blocks completely covered, i.e. all viable tree beds had rocks, on both sides of the road. Between Court and Smith on both Warren St. and Bergen St. Many kids walk down the block careful to step on each painted rock.
When the city’s men were digging up my street one day I showed them my painted rocks and asked them, “If you find any nice rounded rocks please put them in a nearby tree bed for me, or inside my gate?”
They nodded in a way that might have been a serious, “Yes,” and might have been, “I don’t speak English and I’ve eaten too much cheese at lunch.”
The next day it was like Christmas morning when I saw the beautiful delivery. A great pile of rounded rocks. My dad’s a physicist and he mentioned to me once that all rounded rocks are river rocks, that that is the only way to get so smooth.
So I pick up this disk of a river rock and find it is stained with an iron pole of some sort, and the hole these guys were digging was remarkably deep and I wonder if when Walt Whitman was walking around these parts this stone was one end of an iron gate.
I took it home and gave it a kind of arabesque design. I didn’t need to whitewash these rocks from the deep, so I just scrubbed it and let a lot of the rock show through the painting. I even wrote on the back of the rock that it had come from a deep hole dug on Warren St. I put it out. It lasted years and got worn down. Early in 2020 I took it home for repairs, repainting the whole thing. Today it’s once again too ratty to be noticed. Maybe I’ll give it another go even though I’m leaving.
I love seeing them migrate, evidence that someone loves the rock enough to replace it amid their gardens.
I wanted to give some color to the world. They last months out there, then suddenly they’re gone. I imagine all my rocks just inside the doors of all the houses because many were too heavy to carry very far.
It took a few years to realize that I had to find some giant rocks if I wanted them to stay. Whenever we visited the world outside NYC in a car, we’d come back with a few gigantic rocks and a pile of large ones.
Except in front of the school. There’s a big tree on the corner of Bergen and Court and I noticed that rocks there disappeared fast. Was it because it was on the corner of busy Court Street? One day I was around when school let out and I saw the frenzy for the tree and realized I was in a conversation with a ton of grade school children. My heart burst into color. I found rocks of smaller size and painted them, polyurethaned them, and put them out under that tree, around three at a time.
They were left for a while and then they’d start to disappear and, at my own pace, I’d replace them. It went on for years and years. I never told anyone that I was the witch of the magic rock tree. It made me feel insanely good. It got me out of the house. I only stopped when the world did, with Covid.
Even the big rocks (not the biggest) got taken eventually but I realized that when I put them out in groups people understood that it was street art and left them alone so I’d set to work on a pile of fancy rocks at a time. They lined our living room.
I was even in the newspaper for it. When I first read the headline I was chagrined! But a friend pointed out that it was a hilarious NYPost headline and therefore perfect. It was a more pleasant headline in the print copy.
It was not rare that I’d see one of my rocks in a store or apartment’s front area.
Sometimes I’d take a walk and pass a house whose front area was festooned with my rocks. It was a confusing feeling seeing myself taken like this and so beloved.
For years I thought the project demanded round rocks and it was a rare aberration when I painted a cobblestone. At some point I got over this and to begin to specialize in them, because they were available. I’d take one from a tree on Bergen or Warren and bring it back to its old place with a phantasmagoria of color. Once or twice I saw people had cemented one of my rocks down.
There are tons more stories I have about the rocks but I’m going to jump to when Covid put a stop to me. First of all no one was going outside, and most of all there were no kids in the schools, and above all else, I was now a germaphobe like everyone else and loathe to touch the rocks.
This is when I started making art on paper and canvas again.
In the last few years I’ve put out a bunch of rocks, not many. I may go save that saucer river rock and give it a third paint job of the arabesque. It’s been on the street for months and yet I know it will be where I last saw it if I want to go get it. It acts like it has no value, that it is just a part of the city, but secretly it is a treasure, up from deep.
I shudder at the things it may have seen. I keep pulling it into my sink, bathing it, dressing it, setting it out again, knowing the nicer I make it the more likely it is to be taken, but it may well once again sit there in the open world saying, “Somewhere someone is doing something about the grey of winter and the last vestiges of scarred snow, dirt and damaged nature. Here is one who would not take it anymore.”
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A few more pics
Here’s a party-colored banded rock. Lots of trees were once hemmed in by irons that were eventually too small. In pity the city cut the irons away, leaving many tree bases with slots like mouthes or empty hands, into which I love to place a precious stone.
Cobblestone with fallen cherry blossom petals.
Sleeping Man in Sunshine. He stayed a long, long time because he was heavy and then one day, poof. Gone. I stopped painting people on the rocks as they were too reliably stolen. I wasn’t mad. You have to have a sense of humor when you exhibit your art on its own on the NYC street.
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Well there it is friends, another encounter with you has just begun and it is already over. Hold your loved ones close, get some sunlight, start a piece of art, stay alive with us and I shall return to encourage you again.
love,
Jennifer
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