B.C. artist fills front yard with towering stone sculptures

Sawatsky Sign-Off: Sculpture Garden Adam finds out the story behind a front yard filled with towering sculptures.

You may notice the swirling symbol that he “painted” with a power-washer on the sidewalk first.

But by the time you walk through his “gate-less gate”, specifically designed without a lock for curious people to enter through, you can’t help but notice that his front yard is filled with all sorts of towering stone sculptures.

“People come and they peek, and they stop,” Lorenzo De Francesco smiles as he welcomes me into his garden. “Here there are many stories.”

The story behind how De Francesco unexpectedly began making the sculptures begins when he was just a boy, growing up in Italy.

“I remember I woke up in the middle of the night,” De Francesco says, recalling a memory from when he was around seven-years-old.

“I cut a broom handle in half.”

De Francesco says he felt compelled to take a pair of scissors apart too, before spending the rest of the night crafting the wood into a carving knife. The experience had felt wonderful, he said.

“So there was a kind of working with my hands [from an early age],” Lorenzo says.

By the time De Francesco was a teenager he was creating copies of famous paintings and dreaming of attending an art academy.

“But my mother said, ‘You better get a job,’” he laughed.

De Francesco studied and got a great job at a big corporation but still felt like something was missing. That was, however, until he found the works of ‘On the Road’ author Jack Kerouac.

“I read all the books and the poetry,” Lorenzo smiles. “And I thought this man lived the life.”

De Francesco left his life in Europe and embarked on an epic road trip across America, from New York to California. But things did not work out the way he’d hoped.

“You become nothing in San Francisco, you're starving.” De Francesco says, adding how he had no money and no hope. “You’re nobody and you sleep in a closet.”

De Francesco says he was overwhelmed with anxiety when he happened upon someone carving on the street, and he suddenly saw the possibilities of what his life could be.

“I thought I could do that too,” Lorenzo says, describing how he spent the last of his money on chisels and started carving wood, before moving on to stone.

“And then I realized I was unstoppable.”

Ever since De Francesco has pursued his passion for art. He moved to Canada, built a home studio, and now creates both abstract and figurative stone sculptures exploring all the lessons he’s learned on the road of life.

“Life will take you where you need to go,” De Francesco says. “Without you knowing where you’re going.”

And life is like transforming a slab of stone into a work of art, it’s up to us how we choose to sculpt each day.

“Hopefully you can do what you really like, it’s a beautiful gift,” De Francesco smiles.

“But life is a gift itself.”