Painted rocks hidden around town
Perhaps you’ve seen them glinting under a bush, or perched on a wall. Perhaps you’ve seen their painted colors winking at you from a doorway or a stairwell. You pick up the rock and look at the artwork upon it. It may be a Pikachu’s smiling face, or a landscape, or a just an abstract swirl of colors. There may be a inscription, such a “courage” or “love.”
The rocks are a the brainchild of long time Healdsburg resident Katie McKenzie, though she brought the idea from her native New Zealand.
“I knew about it from a friend in New Zealand,” she said. “A lovely person I went to high school with posted it on Facebook, a group called Christchurch Rocks. They have had some hard times there, earthquakes and things, so to get community spirit up and encourage giving and creativity they created a group, and there are a number of them now in New Zealand.”
So in January she set up a Facebook page, and with the help of her 8-year-old son Cameron they painted a few rocks and hid them around town.
“The basis of it is you paint a rock and then you hide a rock for someone else to find,” McKenzie said. “When it’s found it can be left where it is, or taken by the person, or taken and hidden somewhere else. What we like to do is have people take pictures of the rocks and then post them on the Facebook page so people that have painted the rocks can know where they’ve been found and, as they travel, see where they end up. Some have ended up in New York, a few in the UK and a few in New Zealand.”
The Healdsburg Rocks project took a big leap forward recently when McKenzie was invited to set up a rock painting station at Art After Dark in the children’s area. “That was fun,” she said. “We had 100 kids painting rocks. It was really neat, they were really engaged.”
Those rocks were hidden around town, and the posts by finders on the Facebook page have increased. McKenzie hopes to continue expanding the project.
“It’s just starting to take off with momentum now,” she said. “We’re getting a lot more member requests and more things coming up online. It’s taking a while for people to find us on Facebook and we need to try to tell people more about it. In Oregon they have a local senior center painting rocks and distributing them, too. All ages and all art skills can get involved.”
McKenzie hopes the goodwill program expands and continues to lift the spirit of what she calls the “wonderful community in Healdsburg.”
“We’re planning to be there again at Art After Dark on (Sept. 22), we’re going to have a table. It’s all free, you can come and paint a rock and you can leave it and we’ll hide it, or you can take it and hide it yourself,” she said. “We’ll spread love, put smiles on faces.”
Healdsburg Rocks can be found on Facebook. For information about the worldwide movement, and tutorials on rock painting at thekindnessrocksproject.com.
