Phillip Roberts is 81 years old, and he’s been running one of the quietest art projects in the country for the better part of a decade. Every day, he walks three miles through Jurgens Park in Tualatin, Oregon with his wife, and along the way he hides roughly four dozen hand-painted rocks. Thousands of them have piled up over eight years, and until recently, almost nobody knew who was leaving them.
The rocks come from his backyard, and the paint is what’s left on his palette at the end of a studio session. Roberts works until after 10 p.m. most nights, and rather than wash that leftover paint down the drain, he puts it on a stone. He lets the shape of each rock guide what it becomes. It’s a career artist’s résumé on paper, with shows in Kansas City, San Francisco, and England, but this work will never hang in a gallery.
What keeps him going isn’t recognition. It’s the mother who told him that searching for his rocks helped her daughter through a serious illness. Roberts says he’ll keep hiding them as long as he can walk, and he credits those daily three-mile treks for his health. From Sarasota to Venice to Bradenton, we’ve got no shortage of parks and no shortage of leftover paint. So here’s the question: what’s the small thing you could start leaving behind for strangers?
