{"id":345,"date":"2004-02-14T03:11:50","date_gmt":"2004-02-14T03:11:50","guid":{"rendered":"0"},"modified":"2006-09-28T12:08:30","modified_gmt":"2006-09-28T12:08:30","slug":"heart_art","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/?p=345","title":{"rendered":"Heart Art"},"content":{"rendered":"

I read this<\/a> the other day in the LA Times, and saved it for this week’s Good News.<\/p>\n

I’d heard of this guy, but never seen his work; a homeless guy who builds sculptures of stacked rocks and found objects up and down the beach. <\/p>\n

This time around, Stuart Finch hopes to stay in Ventura a few years.<\/p>\n

Last time, he left after a few months. That was early in 2000, when success knocked him for a loop.<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

People loved the amazing stone sculptures Finch put up at the beach. They flocked around the soft-spoken, homeless ninth-grade dropout, donating money, food and clothing. They sent angry letters to City Hall when workers knocked down some of his taller creations, claiming they could fall on children. A hotel even gave him a room for 30 days and a job as a maintenance man.<\/p>\n

That was the final straw.<\/p>\n

“It took me away from my rocks,” Finch said, back on the patch at Surfers Point where his efforts as a rock-stacker started in earnest.<\/p>\n

As suddenly as he vanished four years ago, Finch, 41, showed up again in the last couple of weeks \u2014 along with a new crop of stone spires and minarets and whimsical whatchamacallits that vaguely resemble frogs, penguins and you-name-it.<\/p>\n

Here, the corner of a cinder block was impossibly balanced on a stone the size of a golf ball; there, a gravity-defying stack of rocks fringed with seaweed looked like something a bored hobbit might have put together on his summer vacation.<\/p>\n

“People need this,” Finch said, surveying dozens of his creations arrayed a few yards from the waves. “It’s all about the smiles.”<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Click here<\/a> to see a photo of the man and his work.<\/p>\n

In a world where most art is measured as a commodity, there’s something about this kind of ephemera…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I read this the other day in the LA Times, and saved it for this week’s Good News. I’d heard of this guy, but never seen his work; a homeless guy who builds sculptures of stacked rocks and found objects up and down the beach. This time around, Stuart Finch hopes to stay in Ventura […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/345"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=345"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/345\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=345"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=345"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=345"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}