Rain Painting

Rain Painting is a photographic process that draws upon rain. It does not limit rain to being used as a theme – just as light is much more than a simple subject in Light Painting. Rain Painting photography is produced with rain. Raindrops are at one and the same time photographic matter and prism.

Rain Painting consists of capturing a landscape or a rain-drenched scene, so as to allow the droplets to blot or blur lines, contours, colors… or to adorn them, spangle them with tiny drops, and at times to shake them up, undo them, or perhaps scatter or pulverize them. A given line of windows or street lamps, the silhouettes of certain pedestrians or cyclists, can be drowned in a fine cloud of rain, or can come to lose the integrity of their shape, spreading out like splashes, fraying into shreds, flaring out as flames.

Even so, figuration remains present in this type of photography, and the realm of abstraction is but rarely reached – despite the fact that the rain is in focus. The pictured subject exists indeed, here as a rain-submerged landscape, there as a scene lifted and blown away by a gust of wind.

And Rain Painting fears neither the vibrations of the elements nor, now and then, chromatic noise which, after all, is but the echo of the sound of falling rain.