This week I couldn’t help but notice the rain… Two straight days of rain makes you start to see it a little differently. Plus this was not a pleasant shower that cools everything off on a hot summer’s day nor was it the booming display of a wonderful summer’s thunder storm. No this was that cold grey constant rain of fall. The kind of rain that makes you feel wet all the way to your core. The kind of rain that gets in your bones and stays there. It’s so easy to see the grey and depressing side of that kind of a rain so for this week’s creative practice I decided to challenge myself to see the aesthetic beauty in the rain.
The first thing that I noticed is how being in the rain can be a total sensory experience. Listening to the water fall and drip, watching as it splashes, cascades and explodes and the smell of a fall rain is unlike any other. I wasn’t sure how to best capture the entirety of the experience, but while I was taking photos it seemed that a video might be a great way to share the moment more fully:
I think that on a grey day it is sometimes harder to find the colours that seem so apparent on a bright sunny day in the prairie but as I looked through the view finder while I was filming the video of the rain drops I saw all the colours of the leaves. Then I watched as the drops exploded out of the puddle and created different shapes and patterns. I took several shots of this and finally captured one that expressed the colour, texture, patterns and movement in a single frame.
After being out in the rain for a while I went back inside and had a cup of coffee. While I was sitting on the couch enjoying my coffee and listening to the rain I was watching the drops form and fall down the window. The patterns formed by the rain drops contrasting against the bright colours of the trees and the dark silhouette of the sky again caught my attention.
What a relaxing experience the rain can be when you reframe your approach to it. It’s interesting how subtle an aesthetic experience can be. For some reason I always expect these moments of beauty to be in huge flashing displays but there is definitely beauty to be found in subtlety. This week was a good reminder of that.
Will Whitten 