Thoughts on Creating "A Prayer for Rain"

When I start a painting, I don’t always know where it is going, or why I am painting it. I just know that I am drawn to the subject.

Now that I look at the finished ‘A Prayer for Rain’, I realize it is a prayer.

In “Every Day Sacred” by Sue Bender (given to me by my mother), I read about how Tibetan monks started out each day with nothing but an empty bowl, and wandered, seeing how it would be filled. Bender discovered, “if we approach each day afresh, with our bowls waiting to be filled, we will find at the end of that day that extraordinary things - some so small we may be tempted to overlook them - have come our way.”

We each show up and wander in our own ways, looking, and hoping for something to be filled, taking with us our empty buckets and bowls.

“A Prayer for Rain” was started during the pandemic. The drawing was set aside for years, and then brought out when I needed another demo for a workshop I was teaching. I started the painting during the workshop, and finished it in my studio, working and re-working the background, until it had the poignancy I was looking for.

I suppose that working on this painting is my own version of wandering with a begging bowl, going out (in my case to the studio), and waiting to see what will happen on the paper, using a medium that, after 25 plus years, I am still struggling to understand.