The Eloquent Loneliness of Summer Rain
“My sorrow, when she’s here with me, thinks these dark days of autumn rain are beautiful as days can be; she loves the bare, the withered tree; she walks the sodden pasture lane.” – Robert Frost
It’s been threatening rainstorms all weekend, and this morning they’ve finally broken with a vengeance. I can’t stand rain in winter. I’m of the opinion that if it’s going to be miserably cold and wet, it might as well be with snow. But the rainstorms in summer, I love; the thunder and lightning, the smell of the wet earth when it’s scorching hot. I love the steam that rolls mesmerizingly off the pavement, and god…the green is so brilliant it pierces the heart with a private happiness. And yet, summer rainstorms bring a sweet sadness, a quiet loneliness that makes the world feel so still, poised and ready for me to pour the raw medium of my emotions onto paper. I come home to my art in the rain.
Days like this make me want to shut myself in my room with some quiet music, a cup of coffee, and my paint brushes. I’ve been feeling like drawing/painting again recently with a fervid passion. Usually I am just so lazy that I don’t do anything about it, but I am beginning to reconnect with my emotional relationship to my art, which I had for a long time lost. Such that when I approached art at all over the past few years, it has been with hesitancy and a sort of quiet trepidation. Like that when you are going to see someone who was very dear to you that you have not seen in a long time and you cannot help but worry that they are so different you will no longer feel yourselves “close”. Inevitably, it ends up never being a terrible concern, but the lead up is so dreadfully sad that some days I just opt not to do it.
Art for me, like writing, has always been a deeply raw experience. It taps into an unguarded chaos of feeling – strength, agony, love, loneliness. It requires me to bear everything I am and feel to myself before I can really offer what I’m doing its own special fingerprint. It has been my inability to bear my soul to my projects that with the exception of a single piece, my art has often been flat over the past five years.
I’m convinced that the curse of all artists (whether they be musicians, painters, or writers) is to be esoterically sentimental…often in excess.
