Health

Dorchester man leaves oil paintings around Boston for people to find and take home

BOSTON — Jake Garcia has a passion for painting.

“I love it like so much so that there’s a pretty big meditative quality about it. You kind of get lost in a painting,” he said.

Garcia is a 34-year-old nursing student who lives in Dorchester. He paints images from around the city. Some of the locations include Public Garden and South Boston. He then leaves the paintings for people to find and take home for free.

Garcia posts pictures of the paintings on social media of their locations. He said got the idea because walking a wet oil painting home was too messy.

“You have to carry it like this and I thought this is awful. I thought I should put it on the bench and I then I started thinking, oh what if I put it on the bench and somebody found it there? That’d be very cool and it was kind of just this thing and I put it there and just walked away and I was like wow, I just put that painting there,” Garcia said.

Michael Kunerth found one of Jake’s paintings at Carson Beach. He saw a tweet of the painting and raced from his home and grabbed it in the nick of time.

“When I got there and saw it I was pretty excited. I got there first and when I got back in my car to go back home I saw a couple of people sort of rushing towards the area, so it’s resonating with people. I sort of felt bad not telling that that I already found it. People were rushing trying to look around. It’s almost like a treasure hunt,” Kunerth said.

A treasure hunt that has caught Garcia by surprise.

“I never knew people were so into art, you know. It’s really nice to see. It’s like a really refreshing thing to see people have positive feedback, a positive story there’s nothing bad here. You found a painting that’s great news,” he said.

On the back of each painting, Garcia writes his initials and his Twitter and Instagram handles with a little note saying enjoy this painting.


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