For as long as I can remember I have wanted to be a walnut farmer.  My father and grandfather farmed walnuts here in San Benito County, California and I never had any desire to do anything else.   It was, in all honesty, purely accidental that I became involved in stone artwork.

     I was working on a new piece of ground, preparing it for a new orchard planting.  The soil was proving itself to be extremely rocky.  Well, you don’t have to know much about farming to know that rocks are not a farmer’s best friend (in most cases).  So I went about clearing the ground, unearthing rock after rock, dragging them and dumping them into my growing rock pile. I had rocks of all shapes and sizes, and many times when I hit them with my disk the metal would bend and break and cost me plenty of time and money to repair.  But once in a while, the rock would be on the loosing end of the battle and it would break.  I pushed plenty of these broken rocks into my rock pile, until one day, for whatever reason, I took a closer look.

      I noticed that what appeared to be a plain brown rock on the outside was actually jet black on the inside. I began to examine other broken pieces in my rock pile and realized that the outside of a rock was absolutely no indication of what might be inside.  A rock that looked gray and lifeless on the outside could have streaks of bright white darting through it.  A brown rock could be concealing a dark interior, or many layers of rich earth tones.  The fact of the matter was that each of my broken rocks, regardless of how uneventful it appeared on the outside, was fascinating upon careful examination of the inside. 

     I kept thinking about my broken rocks and about ways that I could enhance and display the incredible beauty that I was uncovering in what were, for all intents and purposes, just plain rocks.  I purchased some rock working equipment and began experimenting with cutting and polishing.  After a lot of trial and error and mechanical modification of my equipment, I came up with a process for extracting the core of a rock, then hand polishing it to reveal the natural beauty that had been hidden inside for thousands of years.

     My large rock pile began to dwindle, and I was thrilled with the extraordinary pieces it produced. I found such a variety of patterns and colors in my own rock pile that I couldn’t resist experimenting with rocks from other locations.  I began collecting rocks from neighboring ranches. Family vacations have become rock collecting missions and the more rocks I drill the more fascinating it becomes. I am now using rocks from as close as my own fields, to as far away as Mexico and Canada.