Rolling stones …

… From Picasso to Jarman: new book lifts the lid on the endless appeal of pebbles - The Scotsman. (Hat tip, Rus Bowden.)

Whatever we choose to call them, though, there’s no doubt that the small-ish, round-ish pieces of rock that line many of our beaches are of far more interest to human beings than they have any right to be, and in their newly published collaboration, The Book of Pebbles, writer Christopher Stocks and artist Angie Lewin set out to explain why. In the book’s foreword, Lewin, who is based in Edinburgh, explains that her attraction to pebbles has to do with an instinctive sense of aesthetics (“I’m no geologist, but I’m attracted to how they look and feel in the hand.”) She also notes how, viewed out of context, they can act as little portals into a whole scene: “a pebble defines an entire landscape for me,” she writes, “and through them, I try to depict the wild places I love.” As her interest in pebbles has grown, she says, so they have taken up more and more of the foreground in her work, and this is borne out by the linocuts, screenprints, wood engravings and watercolours that illustrate the book: pebbles and plants dominate; the rest of the landscape, if it ap