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A Rain Such as This, Relieves Like Tears by Jennifer Riefenberg

After a cold, dry winter the rains of spring bring new life…

The inspiration for this work has been long in coming. Living in an area of dry land, and living the effects of many years of drought, to me rain is beauty and life. Without the blue, rainy days, the flowers curl up and die and the land is void of this beauty.

The ball of me curls inward; skin shocked from tiny, cold bursts of water, yet through a hard-pack soil a tiny flower bursts upward facing the rain with the defiance of a battalion of young soldiers. This small curling green unfolds a brilliant scarlet bud soon to be a flower, bringing bees and hummingbirds sustenance and me, too.

“A rain such as this, relieves like tears” is a slight variation of a quote from Mary Austin’s, Land of Little Rain, a beautiful book written in the 1920’s about the California desert country. The piece is done in predominantly blues (nearly monochromatic), with rains sleeting down on the exposed person and a stronger flower budding. The feelings in the work are fretful, and a bit uneasy. The cold blues and strong emotion evoked by the harsh weather are tempered only by the presence of a tiny flower budding – the strength of the art work.

The piece is worked on a charcoal gray, 32 count linen, using silk, cotton, linen and rayon threads as well as unidentified yarn and ribbon threads. I like the imperfections of linen as a working ground and wanted the imperfections to add to the dynamics of the regular, counted stitches. I chose rounded, curled stitches for the clouds, hoping to catch the effect of big thunderheads and slanting, linear stitches for the rains coming down. Finally, I created a ray of sunlight streaming through the clouds, capturing the figure and flower in its light.

As a side note: With the many other effects of rain – in other areas of the country and world, too much rain is the nemesis – I am guessing that these folks can bring a different meaning to the piece – maybe the effect of sunlight chasing away the rains?

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