Dorothy Hood steadily
increased the scale of her canvases in the 1960s while thinning the density of
her pigments. Paintings from this era express both her inner evolution and her
response to larger currents in American art, in particular Color Field painting
and the work of Mark Rothko.  

The
Light of Rain was Hood’s first painting to enter a
museum’s collection, and with its evocation of Gulf Coast skies, it has a
strong sense of place. Hood stated her ambitions in her journals, “A great
painting makes you remember something out of time . . . as a happening which
did not begin but always was.”