"The First Rain": A Garabaggio Fine Art Print

Oil on digital canvas, 2026. Post-Consumer Baroque series.

April 9th, 2:20 AM, and the rain had been coming down six hours by the time I got the easel under the fire escape. The mattress had not moved. Still on end against the brick where the neighbors left it, and drinking. That is the only honest verb for it. A mattress in rain does not shed water the way a roof does. It accepts. The rain went through the ticking and gathered somewhere inside it and came back out along the bottom edge in a dozen small deliberate streams, and where it came out it carried the rust down with it, so that the stone beneath the mattress was staining too. The stain was leaving the object and entering the city. I want the viewer to see that the flowers are still legible. The damask band is soaked flat, the blue gone nearly to slate, but the pattern holds. What is arriving here is weight. On the second of April this thing weighed perhaps forty pounds. By the end of the month it weighed what a soaked body weighs, and it had begun the long argument with gravity that occupies the rest of the series. I painted with the canvas tilted back so the rain would not take my sky. Far up the street the lamp went on making its gold column on the wet stones the whole time, indifferent, doing for the pavement what nobody was doing for the mattress.

• Giclée printed on acid-free, gallery-grade 220 gsm paper
• REACH-certified inks, sustainably sourced woodstock
• Ships worldwide via Printify fulfillment