Rain

Into each life some rain must fall.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

We live between two countries, between two climates and between two private histories. Australia is a vast continent whose climate is extreme – its sheer scale, comparable to all of the so-called ‘United’ States, drives its terrifying heat and aridity and nourishes its unexpectedly lush zones.

It is bathed in sunshine much of the time and we are mostly grateful for the light and warmth, but when it rains it can feel threatening, biblical. It’s the land of the flashflood, where water scurries over hard, dry ground in search of escape, of somewhere to be, often causing real havoc along the way and denying the landscape the rational irrigation system so much of it needs.

Coming from New Zealand where dampness and its associated chill are conditions most of the country regularly endures, all that sunshine just a short flight away, is symbolic of both Australia’s view of itself as the lucky country and New Zealand’s darker, gothic and self-deprecating atmosphere.

For all that I’ve never thought to make an exhibition called ‘sunshine’ for whilst we confess to loving it regardless of fire and dermalogical threat, it is rain that manifests our need for shelter and warmth, it is rain that carries us off to sleep and it is rain that encourages deeper introspection and poetry. 

When Katherine Mansfield said “I love the rain. I want to feel it on my face”, one can easily imagine that ‘rain’ could be substituted for ‘sunshine’ and find many, if not more adherents to this option. So too of John Updike’s statement, “rain is grace; rain is the sky descending to the earth; without rain, there would be no life” – this is also true of sunlight. 

Whatever your meteorological preference, these artists and I share a regular and unreasonable enchantment with rain. It is a notifiable condition apparently – we are self-diagnosed pluviophiles. It seems inexcusable to not have at least one condition these days and I think better this than a more traumatic variant. 

Saul Leiter’s evocative photographs of mid-century NYC in the midst of torrential rain and snowstorms speak to the acute romanticism encouraged by inclement conditions and his likely life-long condition. 

His photographs mostly place us on the inside, warm and dry, looking out through windows to fairly severe wintry conditions, views blurred by rivulets of rain and compositions cropped with a casual quality of Japonism. Leiter’s images are about intimacy and the close scrutiny of condensation and he himself said “a window covered with raindrops interests me more than a photograph of a famous person.” 

Of course, even if we share Leiter’s intimate snug viewing conditions, I sense that in each of these artists there is something of Caspar David Friedrich’s determined wanderer in the fog that actively seeks out intemperate conditions in search of a little natural adversity.