"Oh no, it's raining AGAIN!"
Rain, when you live in Hamburg or London, is not a fun thing. It's not even really rain. It's drizzle. Everything turns grey, you're cold and miserable, your shoes get wet, your bones get cold. You try to hide under your umbrella while gusts of wind blow tiny, freezing raindrops down your collar. Rain in northern Europe has very little to redeem itself. Rain in Canada is not much better. Winter's freezing rains are treacherous - your feet give way, landing your behind unceremoniously on the pavement, your car makes pirouettes on the highway. No, not fun at all.
And then there's Singapore - now THAT'S rain! Cats and dogs, raindrops big as rambutans, more water than air in the air. And, best of all, it's WARM. Monsoon rain is not the kind of rain I want to hide from, rather, I feel an irresistable urge to run outside, spread my arms and turn my face toward the sky. Which is exactly what I did one afternoon for about one hour (goodness knows what my neighbours think of me). I remember a taxi driver in Manila telling me how, when he was little, his mother would send him and his little brother outside during the afternoon Monsoon rains, with a shampoo bottle in hand and told to take a 'shower'. There I stood, in the back of my garden (minus the shampoo bottle), feeling the rain on my arms, hands and face. Small raindrops, tiny warm taps nearly too faint to feel suddenly turning into large, cool smacks, tapping an indecipherable morse-code into my hands. Fabulous!
"Great - it's raining again! Whoopeee!"
A little later, I was back outside during the afternoon rains, only this time I was standing in the little alleyway outside my studio on Neil Road, holding aloft a canvas covered with thick paint. I was working on my Monsoon Series. Raindrops embedded themselves in the thick layer of acrylic paint, leaving a testimony of their brief existence, a snap shot of that particular rain shower. Because, as I quickly discovered, there are many different kinds of rain, each leaving its distinctive texture in the paint. I spent about four months catching rain, dropping everything at the sight of a large cumulus cloud and racing outside, canvas in hand. The result is the Monsoon Series, a collection of paintings and monoprints. The paintings are of vibrant tropical colour, highly textured so that you want to run your hand across them. You can practically feel the Monsoon rain.
Short of running outside during the next deluge, of course...