Pursuing Pebbles
August 22, 2015
“My peace of mind comes with picking up pebbles. Some people fly-fish. Some people hang glide. Some people do needlepoint. I pick up beach pebbles. . . . pursuing and perusing pebbles gives me pleasure. They are reminders of a natural world that grinds everything down to size. Some the sea shatters and breaks, some it makes beautiful, some it just gives up on. There is an aesthetic pleasure here, and an athletic one in bending and stretching; an intellectual pleasure in trying to figure out the physics of pebbles, the puzzles of tides, the working out of a set of pebbled values that depends upon rock and place and time.”
— Ann Haymond Zwinger, The Nearsighted Naturalist
Watercolor sketches of favorite pebbles
Watercolor sketch of pebble with a hole in it
Watercolor sketch of pebbles
I feel like I am in good company, for the artist Georgia O’Keeffe also was drawn to rocks and often lined her windowsills with these and other found objects. You can see them in these photos from the March 2002 Architectural Digest article:
Rosemary's Blog 
August 22, 2015 at 6:03 am
I’ve got that issue of Architectural Digest. I picked it up off eBay for a dollar, some years ago. 🙂
I’m a pebble and rock sort, myself. One of my treasures is a copper basket filled with rocks from here and there, including one that I once passed off as a baked potato — on a dinner plate.
August 22, 2015 at 2:28 pm
I have one that looks like a bread roll (a biscuit to you?), with a slice chipped off, showing the white interior under a golden crust.
August 22, 2018 at 6:28 am
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