Green Season Art: How Costa Rica’s Artists Record the Changes in Humidity and Light
Each year, May signals a shift into Costa Rica's rainy season, locally known as the "green" season. We have now reached mid-June and the green season is well and truly underway. The intermittent, heavy rainfall, low light, and rapid changes in tone alters the landscape, but it also affects the conditions under which artists work. While the dry season could be associated with clarity and control, the green season imposes a certain unpredictability not least for basic logistics of moving around the country. Water behaves differently. Colours shift. The air saturates.
Read on as we take a look at a handful of MÍRAME's artists and how the green season influences their work.
A Season Made for Watercolour?
When one thinks of painting the rainy season, it’s easy to imagine watercolour landscapes: cloudbanks, wet leaves, standing water, painted in a medium that itself responds to moisture and change. And there is a certain logic to this. Watercolour remains one of the most reactive and immediate tools for describing environments where humidity, fluidity and light all refuse to stay still.
But what of other media? I'm thinking about oil, assemblages, mixed surfaces, photography even, where water is not embedded in the technique itself, but hovers around the work, influencing everything from colour to rhythm. These too participate in the season, even if less obviously.
Watercolour Under Weather
Among those undoubtedly most attuned to these environmental rhythms are artists working in watercolour. In Costa Rica, watercolour holds a long and serious place in the national art tradition, often valued for its immediacy, modest scale, and technical demands. Its susceptibility to moisture also makes it especially reactive to seasonal conditions — a quality that, in the green season, becomes part of its challenge.
Ana Elena Fernández, Cahuita 2, Watercolour on paper
Ana Elena Fernández, whose diverse compositions often depict Costa Rica's landscapes, from water lapping on the sand to layered canopies and luminous air, notes that the season affects her palette, as well as the speed at which she must respond to the paper. Moisture in the air slows drying, increases pigment spread, and changes the behaviour of the wash.
Fernández, who paints from direct observation and memory, rarely works under a static sky. Her compositions are often based on the Pacific coast and the Central Valley, and they are not scenic in the conventional sense. They reflect instead a precise environmental register: gradients in cloud cover, moss on bark, the yellowing of light at midday when rain is due. She remarks on the impact of light in her work and states it's an "all-present element in my work, and the Costa Rican light is different; it sometimes looks green in the humidity".
Juan Carlos Camacho
Juan Carlos Camacho, Tierra Blanca, Watercolour on paper
Juan Carlos Camacho uses watercolour to observe rural architecture, coastal light, and the transient nature of human presence in Costa Rican settings. His use of the medium during the rainy season results in softened edges, unstable perspective lines, and frequent tonal adjustment as a response to how light is actually being filtered through the damp atmosphere. One series, based on small towns in Puntarenas province, shows terracotta roofs and corrugated siding nearly dissolving into soft washes.
Muted Distance: Olga Anaskina
If watercolour artists are naturally drawn to the season’s instability, other painters respond with different strategies. Olga Anaskina, who has a whole series of oil landscape paintings, renders her landscapes through a highly controlled process; she distills a sense of climate into subdued surface effects. Working in oil and dry pigments, Anaskina introduces a weathered quality that fits the season’s psychological tempo. Her "Empadada (El Lugar Que Habito)", for example, doesn’t depict weather in any literal way, but the painting, with its softened edges and rapid brushstrokes, suggests vapor, obscured vision, and light dispersed through suspended moisture.
Olga Anaskina, Empadada (El Lugar Que Habito), Oil on canvas
Roberto Carter: Humidity as Form
Roberto Carter offers an abstract response to these conditions. In one recent painting, "Portales", layers of ochre oil paint are built up into a surface that carries subtle vertical indentations and tonal shifts, suggesting clouded distance or diffuse sun. The forms seem to emerge gradually from within the opacity of the paint. It isn’t a traditional landscape: there is no horizon, no anchoring foreground. But it is atmospheric, conjuring the sensation of moisture and light as they saturate Costa Rica’s air, particularly during the green season.
Roberto Carter, Portales, Oil on canvas
Debris and Evidence: Karla Herencia
Not all responses to the green season are pictorial. For Karla Herencia, who works with found materials from Costa Rica’s Pacific coast, the rains functions as a delivery system. Her mixed-media assemblages, often built from driftwood, twine, rusted plastic, and other detritus that she finds washed up on the beaches, reflect the changes brought by seasonal water flow. What arrives on the beach after a storm becomes source material.
Karla Herencia, Presencias Incrustadas 1, Wooden trunk and plastic
In this context, the runoff carries industrial remnants, eroded fragments, household waste, and Herencia collects their evidence. While Camacho might register the season in soft washes and unstable lines, Herencia’s version is tactile, weighty, and indexical.
Leo Ureña: Photography and the Green Season
In Urena's photography, seasonal change is observed in a different sense. Leo Ureña’s Nature series, particularly his studies of coastal grasses in wet and dry months, creates parallel compositions that reflect the atmosphere’s quiet transformation. One set of images from the series shows the same topography under different seasonal conditions. Below are two images from this set, one dense with green foliage and diffuse light, the other straw-gold under a crisp, dry sky. In both, the sea sits steady behind the hills, unchanged in shape but different in tone.
Leonardo Ureña, from the "Nature" series
The sea is constant, the angle unchanged, but everything else has shifted, not suddenly, but gradually over time. In these works, weather is indexed through patience and exactness, allowing atmosphere to register as difference. The composition is restrained, but the temporal implications are not.
Working Within the Weather
These are just some examples of green season art, and of artists who are responding to, and working within, Costa Rica's green season. For all artists, the rainy season brings logistical difficulties: drying times slow, natural light flattens, materials behave inconsistently. But it also produces new forms of attention. These works, from Camacho’s water-softened facades to Herencia’s tidal debris and Ureña’s slow, photographic moments, are records of conditions. They remind us that in Costa Rica, landscape is not a fixed category. Sometimes, it arrives soaked, scattered, and slightly changed by rain, and sometimes, you simply have to wait for the air to shift.
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