The image above gives the punch line before the story. I put it here because it represents the exhale after four months or so of working on this series.

The Raining Form series was concerned with finding the balance between a defined form, photographs of that defined form, and improvised drawing.

This is the form:

This is the photograph, on the left, on which the form is based:

I intended to follow a format of Japanese screen paintings, with the border around the subject matter of the art and the subject matter portrayed as a story in each of two halves of the drawing. I think that I did that by combining the photographs as the main attraction and the reflection of them in the drawn section below.

The hand-drawn vertical lines represent an idea of ‘rain’ to move the eye from the top section to the bottom section below where I tried to abstract the photograph. The photograph is that of a bunch of dried sage that I had kept in my studio for a couple of years. The photo appears in different sizes and in different configurations until somehow the configuration resembles that of kimono in Raining Form 6. The idea of the kimono is not foreign to my work, but an object of endless curiosity. (See Detail at the beginning of this entry.)

Ever since I purchased a print by Pat Steir from 1974, in which the prevailing imagery reminded me of the paintings she was doing when I knew her well at CalArts, I have been influenced by her sense of design over the entire surface more directly than ever before.

Being influenced by another artist’s work does not mean imitating it or forever deriving work from it. It means breathing that artist’s work in, mulling it over, and folding it into my vocabulary until it disappears into the life of how I make art. Every time. Every piece.

copyright 2026 Lyn Horton