A Rocky Start for Homeless Artist

After he had bummed enough change for coffee and a doughnut, Stuart Finch strolled down Ventura’s Main Street and tried to say “Hi.”

Only one or two out of a few dozen people responded, and Finch wasn’t surprised. At 37, he has been homeless most of his life and doesn’t expect to be greeted with champagne and caviar.

Even so, he was struck by a certain sourness that day, a “don’t-even-go-there” grimness.

“That’s when my light bulb lit up,” he said.

To prompt some good cheer--plus some more change--Finch started building little stacks of rocks on the coastline at Surfers Point. He’d seen a master rock stacker do the same in Pismo Beach, and figured he could do it too. Finch is a ninth-grade dropout and can barely read or write, but he can rebuild an engine, drive a bulldozer, and, by God, he can stack rocks.

Soon there were dozens of them, and then more than 100: Waist-high towers. Minarets. Spires. Cairns. Other stackers joined in.

On weekends, the rock-strewn slope at Surfers Point became a spontaneous tourist attraction. Families dropped by toting minicams. Little kids scrambled down the slope looking for perfect stackers. Passing runners paused to gape.

Newspapers have done features. TV crews have come a-calling. Strangers have bestowed kindness upon Finch. He has collected enough in donations to spring for meals and a night or two in a cheap motel. One woman insisted he have a sketchbook and some charcoal; others have given him a coat, a jaunty hat, a sleeping bag for his nights under the stars.

Suddenly, Stuart Finch, professional transient, became Stuart Finch, moving force behind the most talked-about art display in town. Dithering government agencies have erected one stupendously ugly barricade after another along the crumbling bike path at Surfers Point, but Finch has added a touch of class.

“The president of the United States don’t have nothin’ like this,” he said the other afternoon as he gazed out over the ocean. “It’s my big-screen TV. I wouldn’t trade my life for a million bucks.”

With calloused hands, Finch spends his days building and rebuilding. He picks up the pieces knocked down by wind and wave, and puts them together again in impossible new ways. He daydreams about rigging up a pulley to hoist boulders from the surf, and he pokes around for his preferred rocks--round and perfectly smooth.

On a strip of beach that looks like a troll’s workshop, he showed me his favorite creations.

“Here’s ‘The Archway,’ ” he says. “And this set of slabs here, they’re stairs I built for the surfers. And this one here, I call this one: ‘The Flintstones’ Penthouse . . . ‘ “

Finch didn’t set out to do any of this. He was just hitchhiking through. But at a Ventura restaurant, his buddy ran out and left him unable to pay for two cheeseburger combos. That led to Finch’s arrest, two nights in County Jail, probation, and a strange feeling that he might as well stay put for a while.

“Morning and night, I ask the Lord what he wants me to be doing right now,” Finch says. “And he says, just keep doing what you’re doing.”

Others also find spiritual solace in balancing the rocks of Surfers Point. Over the past few weeks, Ventura artist Karl Stoll has been coming down to the beach on sleepless nights. He specializes in balancing huge triangular concrete chunks on pebbles.

“It’s very much a purging experience,” said Stoll, who figures he’s performed this balancing act about 150 times. “It forces me to stop thinking about what I’m going to do next week, or what I did last week. The one thing in the world is the now, and that rock.”

As for Finch, his current plans don’t go much beyond the now.

He says he has all kinds of skills--”I’ve been a mechanic, a carpenter, an unlicensed engineer”--but his reading problems make it tough to find jobs or hold them long.

So, until something else comes along, he’ll tend his stone garden by the sea.

“All this stuff was here before I was, and will be here when I leave,” he said. “I’m just rearranging it. That’s art.”

Steve Chawkins can be reached by at steve.chawkins@latimes.com.