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"The Rainmaker" —
Oil on Canvas 50.5 cm x 60 cm
Featured in my art journal book, "Explorations of the
Mirror," with companion poem "The Rainmaker" He does not look at
you. He looks through you. This is the Rainmaker — an American Indian shaman
whose face is no longer separate from the world he protects. He doesn't stand
in nature. He is nature, melting into it, made of it. His skin becomes bark and
stone, his hair becomes the shadow of the forest, his breath becomes the
waterfall tumbling from his own cheek.
I painted him with
ancient eyes — one
catching the moonlight, one holding the sun — because he lives in both
worlds. The night world and the day world. The seen and the unseen.
That gaze holds a
knowledge that doesn't come from books. It comes from listening to a
landscape
for a thousand years.
Behind him, time bends. There is a doorway — a pale blue
portal — where two moons hang over a distant mountain and a still, sacred lake.
It is the world as it was before, the world as it could be again. Blue paint
drips like rain that hasn't fallen yet. Gold drips like sun that has never
left. The tree that grows from his shoulder is not just a tree; its branches
are reaching back into that portal, trying to pull that clean, quiet world
forward.
At his feet, marked MMXII — 2012 — a small red marker stands like a
prophecy stone. The year the old calendar ended and a new counting began. The
waterfall pours from his very being into the parched earth below, an offering.
He is not making rain with dance or chant. He is making rain by remembering water,
by being water.
When I wrote the poem "The Rainmaker" for my book
Explorations of the Mirror, this is the man I saw: not a figure from history,
but a presence that never left. The guardian who stayed when we forgot how to
listen. His mouth is set in a firm, sorrowful line — not angry, but waiting.
Waiting for us to remember that we, too, melt into the land if we let
ourselves.
This painting is quiet, but it is powerful. It doesn't shout from
the wall. It watches. It blesses.
For the collector: This is a deeply
spiritual, earth-toned oil with luminous blues that glow like moon on water. In
person, you can see where the face dissolves — the brushwork is intentionally
soft and lost at the edges, so from across the room he stares at you, and up
close, he disappears into forest and rock. It belongs where you go to feel
grounded. A living room, a studio, a meditation space — anywhere that needs an
ancient, protective presence.
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