It is no secret that my stone designs — at least in part — draw inspiration from one of my favorite childhood toys: the Spirograph.
Although I wasn't particularly interested in geometry from a matehmatical perspective, I loved the idea of using geometry to create visually interesting patterns.
Example of a Spiral Stone design, as I paint them now.
Subsequently, I experimented a lot with geometric shapes in high school art class and one of the things that really fascinated me was the way you could create the illusion of curvature and movement... using only straight lines.
Of course, this is only a trick of the eye... there are no curves but the eye perceives curvature in a cluster of tightly packed straight lines.
Early experiment with a spiral in the center; but you can't really SEE it. FAIL!
Many years later — keeping in mind this idea that Alchemy Stones have a spiritual or metaphysical component to them — I really wanted to work with spirals as part of the design, starting almost from the very beginning. In a sense this wasn't actually the initial idea, it was an offshoot of wanting to put the image of a labyrinth at the center of a stone but just not being able to execute it accurately on such a tiny scale.
But since the spiral is also a sacred symbol — going back millennia in human history — I started to work with that.
A very early design, incorporating small spirals
In the earliest stones the spirals were just small design elements that repeated themselves. However that didn't really accomplish what I wanted to do: namely to create the illusion of movement.
Around 2015 I mostly painted "Spiral Stones" that had the conventional Alchemy Stone mandala design and would then terminate in a small spiral at one end of the stone. To be honest, I mostly did this because it was a good way to put a design on oblong stones that otherwise wouldn't have looked all that great!
Another spiral experiment, but it just came off looking "too child-like"
One of the challenges I repeatedly ran into is that these patterns are all created completely free hand; I don't use any stencils or transfers or designs that I draw out in pencil before painting with color. That's a promise I've always felt compelled to stay true to, and it's one of the things that set my particular style of stone aside from some of my rock artist colleagues. Not to take anything away from them — their stones are beautiful as well — but they are generally created using stencils to mark out where the paint's going to go, and with a computer generated stencil, you can make accurate marks to trace in a curve. It's just personal preference but it feels too "paint by numbers" for me.
The design style became my de-facto Spiral Stones around 2016. Passable, but not great.
Eventually, the current iteration of Spiral Stones were born through the use of only dots and straight lines. The first ones were fairly simple and you had to use your imagination to really work out that there was a spiral in there. The most recent iterations, however, do manage to convey that sense of movement and curvature, almost like a pinwheel, that I originally had intended.
Currently, I'm working quite a bit with painting these stones (now that I'm painting again) because it is one of the new categories in the Etsy shop, and it needs to be "populated" with a nice representation of this style. The old styles of spiral stones are among the discontinued items that we have moved to the "shows only" basket I talked about in my previous post.
A "current generation" Spiral Stone. I like these better... and they sell really well at shows.
Before ending this, I sippose I should try to answer the inevitable question: "So what's the big deal with spirals?"
Outside the strict borders of geometry, the spiral is a sacred symbol that represents the journey and stages of change through life as it unfolds. Ultimately it represents taking a labyrinth-like passage that eventually leads the Source of all. The spiral symbol can also represent the consciousness of nature, beginning from its center and expanding outwardly.
Recently completed, on a larger stone, with dual spiral elements. This one took several days to complete.
Spirals are found extensively in nature: just consider the simple snail, the setting of seeds in a sunflower or the much more famous Nautilus shell. Spirals have been depicted extensively by early man going back all the way to the Neolithic period.
That's the Cliff's Notes version... although most who read this are likely too young to know what "Cliff's Notes" is!
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2025.08.10 AS-TXT-339/309