Rain, Gavin (*1971), Cape Town, South Africa
Portrait of a woman

acrylic painting on canvas, labelled right at the edge "GPR 2K+7"

Rain studied art in the 1980s and 90s at the University of Cape Town and at the Ruth Prowse Art School in Woodstock, Cape Town. Influenced by Seurat and 20th century Russian avant-garde art, he discovered pointilism in 2003 and developed his own style, a form of neo-pointilism.

Rain's paintings consist of concentric dots and circles of acrylic paint, which are applied to the canvas in different sizes, with varying densities and thicknesses of paint application. From a distance, the eye of the beholder combines these dots and colors into a whole. The further the viewer steps back, the more clear the motif becomes.

Rain?s objective is to allow the viewer to perceive the convergence of two opposing pictorial styles: the abstractness of the multitude of colorful concentric circles that thicken into dense and imperfect dots in relief, and the figurative aspect of the image that is defined by the sum of these same dots as the viewer takes a few steps back.

Rain uses photos as templates for his sketches, which he covers with a grid to determine the exact position of the points. Rain has a list of 14.000 different dots that he has made. Out of this list, he picks the combination that creates the color he wants.

G. Rain is represented at exhibitions and art fairs all over the world. In 2011 he took part in the 54th Venice Biennale with a portrait of Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi in the Costa Rican Pavilion, and in 2014 he exhibited at TEFAF in Maastricht, to name but two.
M: 100 x 100 cm, M: 100 x 39,4 inch