When the rains came

We have had a very wet Spring in the South East of England, with seemingly endless rain. And then it stopped and I have been watching as the leaves unfurled and listening to the birds singing. And rejoicing in the appearance of the sun. The talk already is of water shortages. It was very different when I was a child.

The sun was always there and my basic move was to look for shade. Everything was hot and dry. Our cats taught me where to find places which had not been touched by the sun, deep under fruit trees or at the back of verandahs. When all was well the sky stayed clear. Darkness, as against shade, meant trouble. Ochre clouds on the horizon meant sandstorms which would sweep over everything; sand would be everywhere, banking against walls, drifting over floors and clogging ears and eyes. Or else there was a different shade of brown as a cloud of locust swept in from the Sahara. Everyone would try to move them on before they ate anything that grew. We never succeeded.

Then, just when you thought it was never going to end, levees of sandbags began to appear along the river, maybe six metres high and three metres wide at the base. Thousands of years of experience meant that people knew the rains were coming. The sand and locusts came out of the west. At the height of the hot weather, we looked east.

All this came back to me when I saw clouds building over the South Downs, prompting me to try to recreate my earliest memories of storm clouds. The colours of the rains were intense and the clouds extraordinary, roiling along above the horizon before rapidly building towers that seemed to go up forever, with the colours changing from deep purple to gold as they climbed.

Currently I am leaving a wide border to my images, to emphasise that the painted areas are arbitrary shapes. I stop them short or deliberately “transgress” and let them run out to the edge of the canvas. Here I would allow the clouds to break through the top border and let a stream run out bottom left as the rain forms a stream that runs diagonally across the lower left quadrant, filling a dry weather track with water. It starts as a dark brown stripe at the intersection with the horizon. It has cut through the edge of the bush, revealing the dark rain cloud touching the earth. It runs out into streaks at the bottom left.

At first, I planned to use a landscape format but the drama of those cloud towers in my head made me go vertical.

Termite mounds echo the shape of the clouds. I softened their outlines and played down the ribbing they usually show, to suggest that early drops of rain were already softening them. Another group of colours: ochres and browns.