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Geology, like all disciplines, has its own set of concepts and I’m not alone in finding many of these concepts fascinating in their own right as well as exciting on account of the possibilities they offer for shaping the form and content of artworks.
Here are the beginnings of my combination of geology and art concepts.

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Reworking

I enjoy the way rocks and minerals are moved and changed over time. They may be deposited at the surface of the earth, broken, eroded, transported, deposited, buried, subducted, melted and then redeposited prior to a new and different cycle.
These reworking processes have their equivalents in the ways artworks can be reworked and recombined to produce new and surprising results.

Mineral textures

Geology recognises the many relationships that exist between the crystals that make up rocks.
Their crystallinity, granularity, crystal shapes and spacial distribution are all described under the heading, texture. There is a lifetime of painting and drawing to be had in finding mark equivalents for the wide variety of these mineral textures.

Restite

When granites are produced by metamorphism intense enough to cause melting, some components of the original rock, more often than not mafic minerals, are left unmelted and can appear as masses of dark material within the new rock. This ‘unused’ material is termed ‘restite’.

For a person that doesn’t like waste, it is very satisfying at the end of a painting session to scrape together any unused colour and use it a ‘Restite‘ painting.
I started off by mixing together all the left-over colour and then applying it in a chunk or patch so that, as the days and weeks went by, a ‘Restite Crystal’ painting slowly crystallised.

More recently, I apply the left-over colour unmixed and more freely to make ‘Restite‘ paintings like these.

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Breccia

Breccia is a type of rock that typically occurs along faults where rock faces move into and across each other so that material is scraped off, shattered and then bound together with a natural cement or with quartz that is deposited by circulating hydrothermal fluids.

Sometimes I scrape my palette really clean so as to remove the layers of fully dried colour. I mix these strands and leaves of colour with the fresher colour that I’ve been using that session and make ‘Breccia‘ paintings like these: