Doug Merrill

I am a geologist who has applied the art I find in rocks to designs on my clothing. The coolest part about my designs is that they’re natural. Even though they can’t be seen without a special microscope, there’s still a type of connection – almost primal – that strikes me visually.

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We are descendants of Neolithic Man (our closest ancestors of the Stone Age) and just as the smell of sawdust reminds a son of his carpenter-father, so too does the feel of worked stone take our psyche back to the bedrock of our civilization. My designs don’t incorporate right angles or specific flashy colors. They are the real deal. I’m sure they could be artificially duplicated, but – in my humble opinion – they’d give you the functional equivalent of a jittery energy drink followed by the inevitable crash.

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Imagine surfing above the stones that hold the design you’re wearing, or climbing a cliff face that has so much happening at a microscopic level, or just hanging out on the beach knowing that any rock you see could have a badass blueprint similar to yours that could relax your mental state back to a time when things were simpler. These are the designs I use, and this is how I find them: I take a piece of stone that fits in the palm of my hand, epoxy it to a microscope slide, and cut, grind, and polish it down to a thickness of 30 microns.  At this point the stone is so thin it’s clear to the naked eye and practically transparent under a regular microscope. That’s when my designs emerge.

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