There are two kinds of rain days in the studio.
I've learned to tell them apart before I even look out the window. You can feel it in the air when you wake up — something in the pressure, the particular quality of gray light coming through the curtains. One kind of day calls for oil sticks and saturated color. The other calls for tea and stillness and letting the work find its own pace.
Both of them are honest. Both of them make good paintings.
The savage days first.
You know the ones. The sky doesn't gradually cloud over — it just decides. Lightning first, then the crack that arrives a second later and rattles something in your chest. Then the rain hits the windows like it has a point to make. Not weather. An event.
On those days I don't ease into the studio. I go straight for the canvas.
There's something about that kind of storm that strips everything down. All the noise that lives in your head — the list, the low-grade worry, the things you said or didn't say — it gets drowned out by something louder and more honest. The storm doesn't apologize for taking up space. It doesn't explain itself. It just arrives and fills everything and for a little while there's nothing to do but feel it.
I stand in front of the canvas and I let that in.
The reds come out on days like that. The deep blacks. The oranges that don't ask permission. I'm not decorating — I'm responding. Ink goes down fast. Acrylics layer over each other with urgency, building the foundation, committing to the surface. And then, when everything underneath has said what it needs to say — the oil sticks come out last.
There's a rule in painting: oil always goes on top. The chemistry won't allow it any other way — you can't go back to acrylics once the oil is down. That's it. Whatever happens next happens in oil, or it doesn't happen. It's a commitment. A point of no return.
On storm days, that feels exactly right.
Those are the paintings that fight back. The ones that demand patience I'm not sure I have, that push against every decision, that look wrong for so long you start to wonder if they're going to resolve at all. And then they do. Not because I forced it. Because I finally stopped trying to.
The storm teaches that every time.
Then there are the mist days.
Softer. The rain comes down like it's not in any hurry, like it has nowhere to be. The backporch kind of rain. The kind that makes you want to sit outside with something warm in your hands and just — be there. No agenda. No productivity. No optimizing anything.
I have a spot on the back porch where I do exactly that.
Tea, sometimes. Wine, if it's late enough. And I just sit with it. The sound of it on the leaves. The way the air smells like wet earth and something green. The specific gray-green light that only happens when the world is gently soaked through. Nobody needs anything from me right now. I don't need anything from myself. I'm just a person sitting in the rain, and that's enough.
I bring that feeling into the studio too.
Those are the slower paintings. The ones built in layers that dry between sessions, that reward patience, that have a quality of settling rather than urgency. The golds and ochres that feel like late afternoon. The textures that take time to reveal themselves. You have to stand with those paintings for a while before they give you anything — and then they keep giving, for years.
There's a particular kind of belonging in that. The sense of being exactly where you are supposed to be, in exactly this moment, not wishing yourself somewhere else or somewhen else. Just here. The rain on the roof and the canvas in front of you and the knowledge that this is the work and the work is enough.
Both days make it into the paintings.
Not as subject matter — you won't find raindrops or storm clouds on my canvas. But the energy is in there. The urgency of the savage day, the stillness of the mist. The thing you carry when you've been standing in your own life long enough to feel all of it.
That's what I'm trying to put into the work.
Not decoration. Not something to fill a wall. The feeling of being fully present inside a moment that won't last — whether that moment is electricity and thunder, or tea, and soft rain, and nowhere else to be.
The studio is where I bring everything I can't say yet. The rain just helps me hear it.
— Kim