Rainy Night 1939

Mortimer Borne captured this rainy night with ink on paper. The whole scene is built up with these tiny, scratchy marks. They seem so tentative, like he’s feeling his way through the downpour, trying to pick out the shapes in the dark. I wonder what it was like to stand there, watching the city glisten. Were his hands cold as he worked? I feel the wetness, the way the rain blurs the edges of everything, and the loneliness of the solitary figures with their umbrellas. There’s a kind of beauty in that melancholy, you know? Borne is part of a long line of artists, each trying to make sense of the world, one line at a time. He embraced the unpredictable, making something beautiful and a little haunting.