When the rain comes down in sheets, and the time of day is just right, all the windows become paintings. Drip lines spread and bleed into one another images form and fade, color advances, all to the soundtrack of a far away crowd, applauding. That’s what it sounds like, applause, if you are wont to think about it that way, and perhaps that’s fitting, for a hard rain is transformative.

After the deluge, as you walk outside, colors are more vivid, and the scent is intoxicating.  A low hush is punctuated by latent rain drops, leaf to leaf, branch to sidewalk. The city is swept clean by the heavens, and the living things, grasses, flowers, humans, reach for the sky in rejuvenation, in thankfulness.

Cities, maybe all places, are like the artists living within them; they thrive upon renewal.

 

–Danny Grosso

There was this thing back then, about reconsidering open spaces, when the era of pavement was getting old, and people where looking for green environs; but I saw red. Was there a phoenix within the wheat fields, or is that an angel rising? It might be Christmas morning among the poinsettias, but then again, those that Frannie sent lasted past Easter, and this heavenly ghost is wearing white. I put the paint on the canvas, big as a wall, and kept going. More red, more red, and my studio was saturated in its reflection, like a nightclub off Times Square, or the inside of an Italian glass goblet. Her wings like a Deco butterfly, she ascends to the heavens, (also red), enraptured like St. Teresa, yet somehow stuck in the modern world; maybe it’s the the cut of the gown, or that design element of anchored dress tails.

A long time ago, all of this was thrilling.

–Danny Grosso