Love Rains Eternal

Pushing the boundaries

Love Rains Eternal is a contemporary painting created with blue, turquoise, copper and a light, mint green. It’s a departure from some of my more established painting styles in so much as it was borne from an experiment we did a while ago with a rotating barrel and then a subsequent enquiry from a client. We’ll look at that in more detail below.

The painting has a definitive landscape orientation to it as that’s the best way to feel the power of the ‘rain’ movements that come from top to bottom. In the first painting I did like this (Neon Rain) I used a different set of criteria and different paint colours but for this painting (keeping the ‘rain’ theme going with the name) I refined and modified that to create a more defined horizon point.

How it was created

The rotating barrel has become quite the spectacle on our live stream broadcasts (every Wednesday at 7:30pm UK time). But you may be surprised to learn that this painting wasn’t created on the barrel – this is the result of what was caught underneath as the paint comes off. Bet you weren’t expecting that were you?

So creating this painting is about applying paint to one canvas and then closely monitoring what happens on the other. So at no point do I ever touch this with my hands except to stretch it around the frame. How cool is that?

The science behind it is quite complicated actually. Critical to that process is the height of the barrel above the canvas i am capturing the paint on. This drastically affects what happens to the paint as it comes off the barrel. There is definitely a sweet spot! Additionally we also have to set a speed that allows the paint to form and fall under the effects of gravity to a point where I can create these long raindrop movements.

It takes a lot of practice and a lot of adjustment to get it right – in fact, for this and one other painting (that a client commissioned) it took us a whole day to get right before we could start the actual paintings.