Sticks and Stones

OK. This is one of the most mesmerizing, simple displays of beauty and gravity I've seen. Bill Dan plays with rocks. He does not chuck'em. He does not collect'em.

Bill Dan stacks them.

And, he does so in ways that seems so easy, yet defy the basics of gravity. I mean, the dang rocks should fall! See video and photos of Bill at work on the rocky shores of San Francisco Bay.

It has to be the first artistic act of man: to stack a pile of rocks and call it magic. Such towers of stones, known as cairns, have marked pathways and boundaries for centuries.

Photos of Dave Russel's garden full of cairns in Asheville, North Carolina at My Avant Garden.

[Thanks to Leah Silverman.]

Andy Goldsworthy | Passage - Three Cairns, 2003 | Galerie Lelong

Watch another master of geologic creations: the patient, medatative Andy Goldworthy whose "media often include twigs, thorns, muds, snow, icicles, brightly colored flowers and leaves. For tools he often uses only his bare hands and found tools" (wikipedia).

The documentary Rivers and Tides captures the light, the sound, the texture of the artist's life collaborating with nature in the fields, streams, seashores and forests that serve as his studio.