Making Rain 2013

When my back and legs started hurting from standing all day, I decided to find some good shoes to paint in.  When I paint, I pour and drip and sand and scrape, and much of that goes onto my shoes. So I didn't want anything fancy. Nurses stand on their feet all day, just as I do, and they apparently like Dansko shoes.  At Savers, my thrift store of choice, I found a pair of used, black, Maryjane Danskos.  Something about them was oddly compelling.  I bought them, brought them home, and wore them into the studio the next day.  However, I couldn't bear to cover them with paint--disrupt that oddly compelling factor. Instead, I set my camera on a tripod and took photographs of myself wearing them.

The shoes became the inspiration for Making Rain.  The clunky Maryjanes with the plain, gray, workaday socks gave form to the legs, made from the negative space of the three poured paint areas.  A photo of dried mud became the dress and the figure was suddenly a giant woman, raindrops dripping from her fingers.  Simultaneously, the legs and the background behind the paint drips morphed into a gray and cloudy sky.  I finished the painting and photographed it.   A few days later it poured, the first significant rain we'd had in over a year, and at the end of July we had a massive rain and wind storm--one of the worst (or best) ever.