I was having breakfast with a dear friend who is starting a business. He mentioned he was thinking of naming the new venture “Rose Rock”. He liked the Oklahoma connection and the somewhat timeless feel. The rose rock is an aggregate of barite and sand formed like a fully bloomed rose, with five to twenty radiating plates or blades that appear as the petals. Few mineral specimens are as distinctly recognizable and traceable to source as the barite roses from Oklahoma. These are also known as “rose rocks” and “barite-sand rosettes.” Other than minor occurrences in Kansas, Morocco, and Australia, the barite roses are unique to this state.
While we talked I sketched this in my book:
My friend liked the concept so I started working it. I tried several ways to render a rose rock form in a very minimal graphic style, but nothing worked as well as my original sketch, so I copied it in Illustrator and finally came to this:
