While working outside Canada last December on a stone tower with dozen other great guys, I got to know Devin Sherwood who was a local, who I had met previously at a Stone Symposium. Devin contacted me later, when he found out the place where we were building the tower was quite close to where he lived, and asked if we could use him on site. Im so glad I said yes.
Devin was a great contribution to the team. The work was hard and required a lot of constant setting up and resetting scaffold as the stonework got higher and higher. The lifting and hoisting up of hundreds of rocks seemed endless but not only did Devin pull his weight cheerfully, always staying ahead of the work load, he found moments in the day to do sketches in his notebook, using a very small fountain pen, of all the fun that was happening on the tower.
His sketching, a kind of comic book style, was something he had taught himself to do every day in a very disciplined way . I was so inspired by Devin's commitment to drawing and documenting what was going on, that when I got home I bought a fountain pen and a notebook and started sketching too.
On April Fools Day we started a new job in the county. While the scene was pleasantly familiar, lots of stones piled all around us, lots of hearting in buckets, and lots of days of walling ahead to look forward to. the difference was, now I was looking at the site with the eyes of someone who had the artist tools at hand to see the subject matter as something worthy of seeing differently. I hope to bring more on-site sketches to my blog in the future.
