“It’s like looking for shapes in clouds.” That’s how Charles Asbury, otherwise known as Geez, described how he finds the designs in the rocks he’s painted for the last three years.

He takes ordinary rocks and looks for faces and shapes in them. Not just painting eyes and mouths on the rock, but looking for where the features already are. He never changes the rock’s natural shape.

“You have to look for unusual rocks, ones with little pits and odd shapes. Interesting rocks,” Asbury said, holding an unpainted one. “See this one here has eyes here – or here – or here – and whichever way you turn it, another possibility appears.”

Three years ago Asbury found the rock that started it all – a large one with a very sharp edge jutting out. That rock now sits next to a fireplace in his house, painted with a blue suit and tie and that sharp edge is now a giant nose.

Painted rocks fill his house: a Red Sox player on the bookcase, a gorilla on a shelf, a smiling old man on the windowsill. Downstairs there are three little rocks Asbury calls his “sleepers,” as they are all wearing pajamas and lying on pillows, perched along the banister.

He wants to set them up in a shop somewhere so more people will see them and enjoy them, but hasn’t gotten around to it yet. “They are hard to price,” he said. “I’ve gotten advice on what I should sell them for, but it’s difficult as each one is so unique.”

Asbury's workbench is littered with dozens of rocks, tiny brushes and pots of paints and looks out on a breathtaking view of Meadow Cove. Once he finishes painting a rock here, he will either make a base for it out of molding clay or frame it in a black box to hang. The final step is his signature, “Geez Rocks.”

He pointed out one rock on his kitchen counter that looks finished, saying that he plans to repaint it. Right now it's a pair of women, one much smaller than the other. He plans to remake it as just one woman, the second woman replaced by an elaborate hairstyle.

Asbury grew up in Huntington, W.Va., and joined the Air Force during the Korean War. After four and a half years of flying planes, he moved to Texas, as he described it, to “a young man’s town, and I was a young man.” Years later, on a rainy day, while he and his wife Sylvia Asbury were living in Houston and visiting Maine, they drove past a small saltbox-style house in a Boothbay subdivision. They bought it as a summer home.

“In Houston, you get up in your air-conditioned house and get in your air-conditioned car drive to an air-conditioned garage and go to your air-conditioned office – it’s too hot and sticky out to just play,” Asbury said. So soon after returning to Houston, Sylvia Asbury looked at her husband and said, “Let’s sell the townhouse and move to Maine.”

Three weeks later they were on the road. Now that saltbox has expanded quite a bit and Asbury said he’s a proud member of AA: “Additions Anonymous.” 

When not at home working on his rocks, Asbury likes to volunteer with Friends in Service Helping, an organization that provides medical transportation. “I’ve gone as far as Portland with people,” he said. He also enjoys trundling around town on his red Vespa scooter, wearing a big red ball on his nose to keep warm.

“Geezer means peculiar old man,” he said happily. “When we moved to Maine I chose to call myself Geez for short.”