On August 21st, artist Lucien Smith made four Rain Paintings on an abandoned baseball field at Camp Hero in Montauk, New York. The work was made outdoors in a single session and documented. The event was closed to the public and open to press by arrangement.

Smith began the Rain Paintings in 2011, the year he graduated from Cooper Union, while living at James Ivory’s compound in upstate New York. The method was a fire extinguisher filled with thinned paint, sprayed across unprimed canvas, learned by observing graffiti writers who had appropriated the tool. What drew him to it was the ability to reproduce a natural process, rain, with a manmade tool. The Rain Paintings took the instrument and removed the wall.

The series moved quickly into the market. Two years out of school, Smith held auction records, opened evening sales, and became a spectacle. The speculation reversed as fast as it arrived. He stepped back from the studio and from most of his gallery representation, and has since pursued a multidisciplinary practice: opening FOOD, founding a nonprofit, and working in creative direction. Delay of Game marks a return to the process.

The title is a baseball term. Rain is the one condition under which play cannot continue. The game stops and the grounds crew pulls up the tarp across the infield. A tarp will be on the field that day, laid down to protect the ground. In baseball it keeps the rain off. Here it catches the paint that falls.

The site carries its own suspension. The field sits inside a decommissioned military installation at the eastern end of Long Island, built for a war that never arrived.

The East End has been ground for this work before. In 2013 the Southampton Suite was made in a self-built plein-air studio in the garden of Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn’s Southampton residence, and Smith described it at the time as the closing chapter of the Rain Paintings. The precedents are Julian Schnabel’s open-air studio, Andy Warhol’s oxidation paintings, Hans Hartung’s use of a garden sprayer, and Monet’s Water Lilies. The suite was exhibited at the Parrish Art Museum in 2020, his first solo museum presentation.

“A process like this is a gift,” Smith says. “When I was younger I thought I needed to keep looking, that landing on one thing so early meant I’d be missing something. I let the market and outside criticism dictate my practice, and that was a mistake. Life has taken me full circle. I think it is time to return to the process I was given.”