Rainy Days of Winter
For my first painting of 2023, I’m revisiting the idea of a painting from several years ago, titled Winter Rain. “Winter Rain” was not personally my favorite painting that I’ve ever created, but it fit in with the seasonal exploration themes of my very first four paintings in my “Abstracted Rainy Moments” original debut collections of oil paintings about rain.
The reason that “Winter Rain” was not my favorite was because it was not as overtly colorful as my other paintings, and I’ve always been a fan of big colors, bold colors, many colors. The color palette of “Winter Rain” was the most muted, subtle color palette I had worked on in awhile, cooler colors predominantly overlayed with layers of white to express the coolness of winter snow and ice in a rainstorm. It didn’t photograph well, and in photographs looked mainly to be a drab dull gray.
Well, enter the opening reception of the first public debut of my “Abstracted Rainy Moments” in 2017, and a friend casually asked visitors to the reception which painting was their favorite, out of the 14 on display. Much to my surprise, a majority of the people said that “the winter one” was their favorite! Suddenly, a painting that I was hesitant to even put up or promote became a star in its own right, when placed on its own wall and with the proper lighting upon it.
That painting ended up finding the right owner years later who absolutely loved it and gave it a beautiful spot in her home.
To start off 2023, I worked on a commissioned painting’s painting to recreate that original “Winter Rain” feeling and color but sized to 24x36 inches (the original was 30x40 inches). I researched my old photos from working on the original in the studio, mixed and matched my colors as best I could. And while I came very close to the original, each rain painting ends up doing its own thing in the end, due to gravity, humidity, angles, thickness of paint and amount of oil. I showed the painting in progress while it was still very much an actively dripping canvas to the commission client, and they loved how it turned out!
So all this to say, we never know if a painting that the artist “didn’t like” or “didn’t turn out the way I thought it would” will become a much-loved work of art, enough that years later it would be commissioned for a painting re-incarnation!
