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Some Thoughts About Rainwatching

 I can distinctly remember, as a child, looking out of the windows of my parents’ home on rainy or snowy days.  After a short time, having become bored with the unchanging scenery, I would shift my attention to the drops of water running down the windowpanes.  I would watch them run together forming and reforming seemingly endless combinations and patterns.  I would watch these apparently random patterns, occasionally shifting my attention back to the worldscape outside, for hours waiting for the rain to end.

 As an adult, I have watched my children absorbed in the same kind of activity, and I have been aware of the coming together and pulling apart of the forces in my life that have brought me to the moment in which I observe them.  In less harried moments, I can imagine the rainy cityscape in which I can see my house, myself observing, and my children watching the water run.  It is a moment of rare awareness, one that I cherish.

 In this series of paintings I have limited my formal vocabulary to rectangular shapes and running, dripping paint.  The boundaries of the shapes fluctuate between being sharply defined and harder to discern, mirroring the kind of shifting awareness that rain-watchers experience.  The paint itself, encaustic by choice, is sometimes transparent and sometimes opaque occasionally obscuring the boundaries of the window and door like shapes on the canvas.  The variations in surface, both real and illusory, reflect the shape-shifting, constantly varying quality of liquid on a flat surface; like rain on a window.  It is easy to get lost contemplating movement and impermanence while retaining a sense of the surrounding stability giving frame.  That floating state of awareness is the core of rainwatching.

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