Art and Creativity Journal: The Unexpected Evolution of Stone Painting
The whole idea of painting on stones has undergone quite an "evolution," since I first started doing this, some 15 years ago.
In the beginning (around 2010) "painting on stones" was a very esoteric art form that only a handful of people were seriously working with. Some worked with geometrics similar to my own, others painted animals or landscaped on stones in great detail. Regardless of subject, people would see the stones and think that the artistic expressions were amazing, and there was plenty of room in the marketplace for a number of colleagues as well as myself, most of whom started doing this at about the same time.
Then, about 10 years ago, came this thing called "Friendship Rocks" which suddenly had a lot of people painting rocks to give to each other as gifts and tokens of appreciation. Suddenly a little bit of the art went out of the process, giving way to something more "folksy.".
No more than about a year later hundreds of local and regional rock painting groups came into life which involved lot of people of all ages and demographics painting rocks at home and in groups, and leaving them around in public places for other people to find and trade, as a type of a community exercise.
The original intent was mostly to get people to go out and use green spaces more and to provide an objective for doing so. Collecting painted rocks while doing so provided a good motivation; the proverbial "carrot" to get people off their butts and actually doing something.
Of course, the downside to this development was — at least for those of us taking it seriously, as our artistic expression — that we went from creators of esoteric art that was broadly admired to a general atmosphere of "Oh, my kids also paint on rocks!" You could say the whole thing had been rather devalued, or at least changed, in terms of where it fit people's perceptions vis-a-vis being an actual artist.
With the sudden popularity of rock painting groups came commercialization. All of a sudden people were writing books on how to paint on rocks, and creating instructional videos on YouTube, and there were even rock painting kits and stencils you could buy on Amazon, and almost everybody was getting into it.
From an artistic/commercial perspective, that represented pretty much the low point of the process, combined with the Covid lockdown years where people suddenly had more time to pursue "activities." But an interesting thing started happening because people discovered that rockpainting as actual art was actually quite difficult to create. The pretty rocks and the pictures in the how-to books and videos turned out to be a lot more work and difficulty than expected.
Now we sit here at the threshold of 2026, and we're slowly heading back to the "intricately painted rocks as esoteric art" place that we were in 10-12 years ago after a decade of being in the dumps... at least from a commercial standpoint.
Frankly, I'm very happy to see that we may have rounded that particular corner and maybe I can start enjoying more actual art sales, once again.
While this past weekend was by no means a huge sales event, I was glad to see some of the higher priced items starting to be sold, along with the almost total absence of "my kid paints on rocks" commentary.
I'm taking that as a positive direction, at least...
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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2025.12.07 AS-TXT-349/319