I struck gold yesterday – in the packing of a box of unpainted pebbles, hand selected, no doubt from the pebble ridge at Westward Ho! Many were primed ready for painting, some untouched, and one half-painted in orange gloss. 
The small cardboard box, labelled in Dad’s handwriting “STONES – UNPAINTED” was packed rather oddly with gold foil bags around the outside. Did he do that, I wonder? Gather old coffee bags, perhaps for their collage potential? Or did Mum do that when she packed up his things when she moved house after he died? I must ask her. Either way, I rather liked the contrast of the ethereal gold shiny papers and what that symbolises, with the substantial solid earth-bound pebbles in states of transformation.
Dad enjoyed finding the image in the stones and painting pebbles with, often humourous, images: a guitar, a cat, a spiral column of figures. Its interesting to handle these stones-in-waiting and to speculate what they would have become. Here is an example of a painted pebble, a gift to his grand-daughter, Maeve, painted in 1989.
Sophie
