Rhonda Gates
As a landscape artist, I seek places in the environment where I can submerge myself in the sensory experiences of those places: listening, seeing, smelling, and feeling the inherent qualities of the landscape. Then, I analyze and deconstruct the sensations and curated elements from those places to present them as reorganized impressions of atmospheric abstractions of light, space, and place.
I use paint and graphite as tools to create delicately balanced depictions of spatial depth and flatness of surface as I lean into my engagement with memories of those places. The resulting paintings provide intimate glimpses of my immersion in the landscape and encourage sublime experiences with contemporary landscape painting. In my paintings, the poetry of air and light blend into tangible material—the alchemy of abstraction—as my experiences coalesce as memories and are transformed, culminating in elegant, conceptual abstractions that are stabilized within a geometric organization.
My ephemeral memories of experiences within the landscape, with different weather, light, and flora/fauna/shapes, become transformed into lyrical, simplified works of art.
