Last week at the fair, someone asked me whether painting on rocks "made me happy."
It was the first time someone had asked me that... most questions I get are about technique, paint types, sources of inspiration and such.
It made me realize that the answer was actually more no than yes. "Happy" is just not the right way to describe my relationship with painting stones. Maybe "peaceful" would be a more appropriate term.
I paint because it is a way of quieting my noisy brain, and a way to chill out. In some weird way, it's a form of creativity that allows me to "move" some of that noise from my head and onto the stone. Once that transfer happens, I feel calmer.
A finished stone definitely affords me a sense of accomplishment, and that is amplified whenever someone decides to buy one, for no reason other than "they just have to have one."
Painting these mandalas has always felt like a substitute for meditation. When I was a teenager in school — when I first started doing the pattens, just with pen and paper — it was a way to bring the clutter in my mind under some semblance of control.
Somehow, I intuited that it could help manage my ADHD... even though I had no idea what that was, and certainly hadn't been diagnosed with it.
"Diving into" the pattern perhaps allowed me to hyperfocus in a way that kept me calm... but annoyed the hell out of teachers.
All the years of just drawing on paper eventually gave way to painting on stones.
Somehow, that served a dual purpose, in the sense that beach combing was like a walking meditation, and then painting was a subsequent meditation.
I don't "do drugs" for my cluttered and racing mind... it's all completely self-managed. And painting mandalas on rocks is one of the most effective management methods I have been able to come up with.
I definitely do enjoy what I'm doing!
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Thank You!
If you enjoy painted rocks, do check out The Hive Rocks Project and help spread the word about Hive, while also being creative!
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2026.10.13 AS-TXT-409/379