Apparently, I’ve Been Collecting Rainbows for Years

Hey, hello there, friend!

Last weekend, Southern California apparently decided to put on one of its most dramatic performances, and somehow I missed the entire thing.

A huge double rainbow appeared across the sky at sunset, and by the time I realized what had happened, my social media was basically one giant rainbow appreciation society. Everyone had a photo. Everyone had seen it. Everyone except me.

And yes, I was a little jealous. But then something funny happened. Looking at everybody's photos reminded me that I have painted quite a few rainbows over the years. So I went looking through my paintings, pulled some of them together for a little Instagram carousel, and suddenly realized this wasn't just about the rainbows I had painted.

Rainbows have actually been hiding inside my work for years.

If you've followed my paintings for a while, you probably know that I love gradients. I've been developing and mastering my ombré technique since around 2016, blending one color into another and then another, sometimes so gradually that it's difficult to tell exactly where one ends and the next begins.

And when I look at my work now, I think my entire palette has a little bit of a pastel rainbow living inside it. Which makes perfect sense when I think about it, because I have always loved an excuse to use ALL THE COLORS.

But painting an actual rainbow has another meaning for me.

A rainbow means there was rain first. I grew up in Brazil, where rainy days were simply part of life. Then I lived in Seattle for two years, so let's just say I became VERY familiar with rain.

And then I moved to Southern California.

For many of the years I've lived here, rain has felt almost like a special occasion. When it finally comes, we talk about it. We cancel things. We forget how to drive. We stand at the window watching it like something extraordinary is happening outside.

And apparently, somewhere along the way, I started painting rainbows. Not because I was constantly seeing them, basicly the opposite.

In all my years living in the South Bay, I can remember experiencing a really spectacular rainbow in person only once, maybe seven years ago. Yet rainbows kept finding their way onto my canvases. I've painted them into my own work, I've had collectors commission rainbow paintings from me, and sometimes I think they became almost a little call for rain.

Or perhaps a memory of it.

[RAINBOW GALLERY]

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Looking at these paintings together now, years later, is fascinating because I never sat down and decided, "I'm going to become an artist who paints rainbows." They simply kept appearing.

And that made me think about how much of an artist's life gets recorded in the work without us consciously deciding to record it.

We paint what we see, of course, but I think we also paint what we miss. What we remember. What we hope to see again. We paint places that stay with us, colors we can't stop combining, skies that probably never existed exactly the way we painted them, and little pieces of our own history that sneak onto the canvas before we even understand why they're there.

Maybe that's why seeing all those rainbow photos last weekend made me want to go back through my paintings.

I missed that rainbow. But apparently, I hadn't been missing rainbows at all. I've been collecting them for years. And since Southern California has already given us the rainbow, I suppose there's only one thing left for me to ask:

Can we please have some more rain now?

Tell me which one is your favorite,

Color Your Life!

Drica