Balancing Act...

 A family vacation in Arkansas... on the last day with everyone busy elsewhere, I found myself stacking rocks... and more rocks... higher and in more daring configurations. Maybe 12 or 15 balanced cairns (one rock balancing on top of another, not mounds of rocks as most cairns are) of varying sizes, some decorated with driftwood or fresh picked wild flowers. When it was time to go I quickly went around and took iPhone photos... which left much to be desired in quality but you can at least see that I had a lot of material to work with. They are amazingly stable and I like to think I would find remnants of at least a few if I visited today, four months later. I even hope new visitors to the campsite would enjoy and make more of their own... but no matter...

These granite river rocks came from a trip to Maine, the angular marble types are native to Alabama. I've been moving these to the lake house where, surprisingly, there are next to no rocks (different story just a few miles east.) This configuration of round rocks will last for weeks and there are no shims for stability...

While chatting with friends around a picnic table I absentmindedly picked up a few pebbles from the ground and began stacking.

With my iPad, I started playing with the ArtRage app and have been using it to make my summer stacks stand out from the original photos where they are hard to distinguish.

 Not exactly an art form, simply doodling and thinking... a fun way to become familiar with the paint program and I liked the possibilities.

So... I figured that was that...it had run it's course. But last week a strange muse took over... couldn't get the rock stacks out of my mind. This studio photo shows four of the six or seven in progress... there will be many variations before they find their own voice. But right now, this seems to be exactly what I need to be doing. (The orange vertical was a finished work which I'm using as an underpainting... the others are from scratch.