A Meditation on Weather, Memory, and the Sacred Southwest
In this oil painting, Veil of Rain, I explore the sacred dialogue between land and sky that defines the high desert of northern New Mexico. The composition is structured with a sense of clarity and containment—like looking out of a window—but what unfolds beyond that imagined frame is anything but static. A rainstorm, rendered in vertical veils of grey and violet, cuts across the middle ground, suspended between earth and an overburdened sky. It is an image of motion held still.
This work is as much about feeling as it is about place. The heavy clouds gather in stylized masses, almost architectural in form, while the land below is parceled into planes of ochre, sienna, and soft green—color fields that echo both the geometry of agriculture and the fluidity of memory. As the road cuts diagonally across the canvas, it leads the eye through space, suggesting a journey, a break in the stillness, or a trace of human passage.
Stylistically, Veil of Rain draws from both Southwestern modernism and expressionist landscape painting. I’ve long been inspired by artists like Beatrice Mandelman and Charles Burchfield, who saw in nature not just beauty, but emotion, pulse, spirit. The rain here is not only weather—it is metaphor. It speaks to release, renewal, the weight and blessing of water in a place where it is always awaited.
There’s also a quiet tension between the flatness of the composition and the depth of the atmosphere. I’m interested in that balance: how abstraction can still hold space for longing, for ceremony, for the deeply personal connection I feel to this land. Every brushstroke is a kind of remembering—of monsoon seasons, of watching distant storms through old windows, of moments when the land seemed to breathe with you.