When you grow up surrounded by art, you can’t help but see the world as a canvas.

Ingrid Ilg has never known life without art. Her father is an artist and mother is a writer, and she said they’ve kept every drawing she’s made since childhood.

She moved to Duluth a few years ago and started collecting Lake Superior rocks.

“Canvases are a little bit daunting because they can be expensive. They’re big. You don’t want to take too much time. It’s a lot of pressure, I felt,” Ilg said. “But with rocks, you can always find another one.”

So she started using rocks as her canvases. She’s inspired both by their natural shapes and her mood at any given time.

One of her favorites is painted as the Edwin H. Gott under an orange sky.

“I picked this one up at Larsmont on one of my breaks. And I’m like, this looks like a ship! Like this is a ship shape. And I’m obsessed with this ship,” she said. “It was one of the first ships I saw when I was up here. It has a wonderful horn.”

Another rock became a penguin, and another a bouquet of lupine.

Finding the rocks brings mindfulness.

“Like this is the area you’re in. Look around. You don’t need to be on a screen. You don’t need to have high stimulation all the time,” Ilg said.

For her, painting them is therapy.

“When your brain’s really full and you’re doing life and you’re working a lot, but you take the time to just paint these dots and take the .2 seconds that it takes to focus on that dot, if you do 200 of those dots, you’ve just spent a good amount of time just focusing on creating in a mindful, relaxing practice,” she said.

Giving them away brings simple joy.

“I put hundreds of rocks out all over the Shore, and they all disappear. They’re all found. I don’t ever see them again,” Ilg said. “I love breaking that social norm of you’re just waltzing along a beach and here’s a rock that looks like a piece of pizza.”

She also sells them. She’ll be at all of Hoops Brewing’s holiday markets later this year.

She posts about her work and lift on Instagram.