Rock painting in Monticello

Lazaro Aleman
ECB Publishing, Inc.

If you walk around town, you may have occasionally noticed a colorfully decorated rock lying against a building, on the doorstep of a business, near a public bench or wherever the rock painter fancied placing it.
If you’ve wondered about the significance of the practice, it’s all part of a worldwide trend that involves people – most commonly, but not necessarily always, young children – who paint the rocks or stones and leave them lying around for others to find and enjoy.

The idea is that if you find one of the painted rocks, you are supposed to do one of several things. You can keep the rock; replace it with one of your own design; photograph it and post the photo online (for the originator to be able to track its journey); or re-hide it elsewhere for someone else to find (a sort of hide-and seek treasure hunt).

”It’s all about spreading joy, creativity and bringing the community together,” says a local enthusiast.
The Kindness Rock Project, as the trend is formally known, supposedly started in Massachusetts in around 2015 when a woman began leaving rocks with inspirational messages on the beach for a friend to find.

As happens in today’s interconnected world, someone posted the activity online and it went viral.
Today, according to the website of the Painted Rock Life, which bills itself as “The home of painting, hiding and finding rocks!” communities of more than half a million people worldwide enjoy the activity.
And at least one of those communities is in Monticello, and includes Sukie Chambers, Jackie Clemens, Renee Long and Stephanie Sutton.

It was Sutton, in fact, who reached out to the Monticello News in order to bring attention to the local “rock hiding and hunting community,” which she said had grown of late due to the strictures of the coronavirus pandemic.
“We have quite a few members now and have a Facebook page (Monticello rocks), which we’ve had for almost four years,” Sutton said. “We get new members all the time. It’s really growing.”

The group, she said, basically paints rocks and hides them around town for kids and adults to find and enjoy.
“We have all worked really hard on this,” emailed Sutton, who holds rock-painting sessions for the youths in her church. “I even have little painted flowerpots around town that I fill with blank rocks for the community to paint. The flowerpots get filled every Saturday and are almost empty by the end of the weekend. It’s all grown so much and is such a joyful activity for all. It spreads joy and positivity and lets kids be creative.”

Sutton also wanted to bring attention to the rock snake that several of the women in the local group are building at the foot of the Sgt. Ernest “Boots” Thomas Memorial on West Washington Street.

The snake, complete with a rock snakehead, is composed of a long row of painted rocks, placed one after the other in a winding pattern.

Chambers started the snake at the memorial, after another one that Long had started in town disappeared. A sign at the base of the memorial tells people not to take the rocks, and Chambers regularly photographs the snake to ensure that no rocks are missing.

She, Clemens and Long add painted rocks to the snake periodically. As of last week, the snake consisted of 153 rocks, with the goal being to reach 200 rocks before the Christmas holidays.
The two say that people come to the monument to view the snake’s growth, photograph it, and sometimes add rocks of their own to the creation.

Rock painting enthusiasts say the activity is fun and easy to do. One can simply pick up rocks in nature and paint them. But for smooth, flat surfaced rocks that are ideal for painting, they can be gotten by the bag in stores, along with other needed supplies such as the paints, brushes, labels and sealant to protect and preserve the paintings.
Not to overstate the case, but it’s reported that as the rock-painting craze has spread, derivatives have arisen, such as rock painting as a social-emotional learning activity for kids; to support particular charities, events or movements or simply as a fun and safe activity in these pandemic times.

There is even an International Drop a Rock Day, which is unofficially celebrated on July 3, with people encouraged to leave painted rocks in public spaces.

And then there is this, as reported in the Washington Post: About seven months ago, in order to combat the isolating effects of the pandemic shutdown, a family in Grapevine, Texas, started placing painted rocks along a mile-long public walking path near their hometown.

The idea caught on with another Grapevine family, who posted a request for rocks on Facebook in order to turn the path into an art attraction and destination point. Ever since, the two families have been flooded with painted rocks from around the country, and not just any painted rocks, but carefully handcrafted and intricate works of arts, featuring every kind of image imaginable, from pop culture to sports to fanciful characters to religious themes to current events.

Now hundreds of people reportedly visit the site weekly to view the growing “wonderland of more than 4000 art rocks.”

Now you know, in case you thought that rocks were just rocks, or good only for throwing.