River Rocks
Collecting Rocks
I like rocks, specifically the smooth river kind. I love the feel of them. I love their colors and shapes. One of my favorite things to do is to walk into a creek, river, or ocean and collect stones. Doesn’t matter if it’s a hot sweltering day or a cold rainy one. Usually, I can convince my husband to pack out a few from the trail, and I can usually carry a few. As you can imagine our house and yard are filled with stones I have collected over the years. Mostly from the mountain streams and rivers of western North Carolina. I also have several baseball-sized ones from the northern West Coast and Alaska. These are some of my favorites. I got one of the best “Are you freakin serious?” looks from hubby and daughter when I started packing my beautiful stones into shipping boxes when we were moving back home to North Carolina from Alaska. Yeeahh, I was given a hard time for that for a couple of years.
They just don’t realize all the great uses stones have. Door stops, paperweights, garden sculptures. The list is endless. It just depends on your imagination. I like to use my found treasures in my garden beds. One thing I do for meditation and to be present is to stack stones. And the beauty of this is that it is not permanent. Here one day, gone the next. Which I feel is the perfect metaphor for life. Things are constantly changing in our lives: some good, some bad. The bad is my rock sculpture getting knocked down by my dogs. The good is there is an opportunity to create a new sculpture. The stones are constantly evolving into something else.
Trial and Error
I have had lots of changes in my life. Some I absolutely did not want. And they were very painful. But the beauty of that, as in the beauty of my dogs knocking down my stacked stones, is that when one thing is taken away another is given.
There is a sense of movement in nature. A drive to move through the entropy of the universe to create balance. My paintings are a reflection of this, the chaos of the ever-changing situations in my life. I think we all strive to move through the entropy of grief, disease, trauma, & stress. My paintings are a meditative movement to make sense of the world. The new watercolor stone series is a reflection of this struggle that can lead to beauty & balance. Sometimes it’s very easy to stack stones. They’re smooth and flat. They have lovely rounded shapes. These forms allow you to stack a bigger one at the bottom, smaller ones in the middle, and a mini at the top. However, it’s not always that easy. Sometimes you have stones that are irregular in shape. They have divots and points. They could be rectangular with rough edges that have not been smoothed down by the elements. This is when you have to start thinking outside of the box. How do I stack my stones that don’t fit together? How do I balance two parts of my life that do not go together? They are not of the same puzzle. Trial and Error.
I may stack a much larger stone on a smaller stone and it falls. In our culture that would be a failure. Is it though? There is no growth, and no learning if you do not fail. Failing is a blessing.
After trying to stack this crazy-shaped stone and it always falling off, I learn. I learn where the divots are located. I learn where the smooth parts can be found and how they all fit together. With patience and a couple of hours sitting in my garden, I have created a sculpture. They always end up bigger than I envisioned so perhaps I should say Rock sculpture. Rocks, the size of a dinner plate, or the shape of firewood. I finally get it just right. It was stable. It looked beautiful. I had friends come over to oooohh and ahhh over it and what should happen a week later. My wonderful, loving, aggravating, cute furry canines got a little rambunctious around that particular garden bed and crash … 😤. There goes my sculpture.
What was the true artistic experience? Looking at the sculpture as I walk down the garden path? Sitting in the garden bed on a sunny day, with a sweet breeze. Being completely immersed in my task for several hours? Some people have told me that this is called flow. I like that term so in my humble opinion, Art is not just walking down the gallery hall and looking at pieces hanging on the wall or sculptures standing in the middle. Art is your experience with a creative piece, and how you interact with it. You don’t have to feel it with your fingers. You just have to be with it and allow your mind to flow.
