One evening after a day of rain showers, Anne Griffiths was driving home from her studio. It had been a hot summer on Vancouver Island, and the months of sunshine had left the land dry and arid. She rolled down her windows to smell the wet earth and listen to the birds singing between the trees, so loudly and joyfully that it sounded, to her, like a celebration. This moment was the starting point for The Bliss of Rain, Griffiths’ solo exhibition at Kristin Hjellegjerde, featuring fourteen new paintings that depict not so much the rain itself, but how it is experienced, both in the landscape and the body.
Griffiths’ work is heavily inspired by her natural surroundings and the particular weather patterns of the west coast of Canada, where the predominantly grey and wet climate produces a quiet, reflective mood. While she has always experienced a feeling of calm with rainfall, she is interested in how the lack or presence of rain is now increasingly at the forefront of our minds, and how in some parts of the world, it now feels like a gift where it was once regarded as an inconvenience. This shifting relationship with rain brings a particular poignancy to Griffiths’ paintings.