this rock on the ground at Will Rogers State Park in Los Angeles in the spring of 1980. The stone was smooth, about as big as a softball, and speckled like a bird's egg. I took it home. It sat on a shelf, catching my eye every day. I had a feeling I wanted to do something with it. But what? A mystery. Summer Solstice morning that year I sat on the sand at Pirate's Cove in Malibu. A stick, a white ribbon, and a chocolate milk carton were the treasures of my beachcombing. The carton had startled me. The night before I'd dreamed about drinking chocolate milk. In a reflective mood, I tied the ribbon around one end of the stick. Sitting there with the stick in my hand, I got ready to draw something in the sand. The Yin-Yang symbol occured to me. But somehow I was not satisfied. For inspiration I looked into the sky and asked, "What is the simplest way to indicate the interaction of the female and male cosmic energies?" Then it was as if the stick took over. It was as if my hand allowed the stick to draw
this diagram in the sand. Now I knew what I wanted to do with the rock on the shelf. During the next year, my last in Los Angeles, I worked constantly with that design, both on rocks and on paper. Nothing remains from that period to show you. But when we moved to the mountains of North Carolina, I came across river rocks from local streams, and white quartzite stones brought in from the Sandhills of South Carolina. With colored ink I did the
first of the Roxx. Every night at home after my job I drew with pen and ink on stone. I decided to call myself the Rock Inscription Workshop. These are small
Lucky Roxx that I sold for a dollar each. Here are others I sold at craft shows:
My wife makes quilts. Her patchwork patterns gave me some ideas:
I drew other iconic invocations:
Imagining the Roxx in ceremonial or ritual settings, I made
them into assemblages I called Tunkans after the Lakota
word tanka -- meaning "grandfather" and "stone:"
Artpark in Lewiston, New York was presenting temporary on-site
works at that time. I developed my Tunkan idea into a
participatory rock-design project called Shining Rock Mountain
and brought it there in the summer of 1983. A
shrine of nine tall Tunkans greeted visitors. A
sign explained its significance,
Atop the Tunkans were
stonesthat I'd gathered early each morning from Lake Ontario's shoreline, decorated later by
visitors. They really got absorbed in the project. I'd suggested the plus-sign-in-a-circle motif. The
results were
imaginative and
varied. I enjoyed watching them work in a medium that meant so much to me. It was satisfying to watch them place their finished products on the cylindrical
Tunkans. On the central Tunkan I'd done a sand-and-stone
offering, my only contribution on the summit of the Mountain. At the project's end, I placed the people's stones on a
hillside next to the presentation area, leaving them to the elements and the fates, and with my wife and daughter drove back to North Carolina, where
one of the Tunkans stood beside our house until it collapsed after a few rainstorms. Over the next five years or so, the Roxx took off in a new direction, starting in complexity and ending in extreme simplicity:
This one's still in my collection.
Then the rocks got bigger.
I began thinking of the photographs as the final stage.
My designs started following the pattern already present in the stone.
Not using the stone, but being used by it.
Listening to what the stone had to say.
A cosmos in a stone.
A spirit in a stone.
Life blood.
Living stone.
Stoned.
The Approach.
The Realization. I'll conclude by going back before the beginning of this story. In 1968, in a Columbia University library, I found some photos of wonderful bas-relief designs on temples in India. I used my pen and ink versions for an article in a magazine where I was the art director. I saved my originals. Eleven years later I chose three of them, made copies, colored them, and made this collage called
"Flower Cross". So, as you can see, I'd had designs like this on my mind for a long time. Thanks for coming along on this journey with me.