A landscape is this incredible space that gives us permission to exhale, to gasp, to become quiet in reverence and awe or with a sense of powerlessness and fear. Rhonda Gates is a painter, consumed with exploring, touching and observing nature.

The landscape serves as her visual language to examine the relationships between different elements from her experiences: ephemeral qualities of light; and the forces and energy of nature; trees and/or rocks or other elements interspersed within the scene. She then reduces her observations into quantified units, analyzing the human relationship to nature and the planet.

 

Light, color and texture are her chosen tools to document, analyze, and convey her interpretations of those relationships. Gates absorbs the views, then selects specific attributes and features to organize, distill and to ultimately divulge to the viewer.

Gates incorporates stylized features (ie. rocks/trees/leaves/rain/snow, etc) to provide just enough information for the viewer to arrive at a generalized idea of the place and time portrayed in the paintings. Her simple, elegant compositions are fundamentally stark and abstract, often organized geometrically, presenting a stripped down impression of an intimate immersive connection to the landscape and moments in nature.

Gates engages the surface of her paintings with vigorous brushwork, thick paint and nuanced gradations to engender a sensuous, tangible quality to space, distance and atmosphere. Soft graphite is incorporated to depict features that punctuate the atmospheric spaces while fleeting light effects evolve within the framework of predominantly geometric shapes.

 

 

The carefully constructed paintings present the viewer with visual structures that reveal unexpected aspects of the landscape and provide a sense of mass to atmosphere, all the while allowing Gates to explore subtle nuances of color, the physical properties of paint and tension between surface and space, and how humans see themselves as separate from and outside of nature.

 

IT HAS BEEN SAID THAT ART IS A TRYST. FOR IN THE JOY OF IT, MAKER AND BEHOLDER MEET. 

– KOJIRO TOMITA


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