Rhonda Gates
Visual Art
Rockford, IL
Rhonda Gates’ paintings strike a delicate balance between the suggestion of spatial depth and the flatness of surface. Simplified representations of natural forms serve as environmental cues, furthering the tension between surface and space.
She exhibits her work through the U.S., with representation in the Chicago area, and is included in important private and corporate collections including the Elmhurst Art Museum (IL) and Swedish American Regional Cancer Center (IL). Gates’ paintings have been the subject of reviews in Art in America, artnet and the Chicago Tribune. Her work has been describe as presenting surfaces that are “luscious and juicy,” radiating “a powerful inner light” that beckons the viewer closer.
Her paintings begin as personal experiences in nature during which she focus on the relationships between the formal elements within the scene. In her studio, she digs deeper into her observations and memories, and meditates on the experiences to isolate them visually into an inherent or implied geometric structure and the organic elements and forces that interact within that structure.?
At Ragdale, Gates will continue contributing to the ongoing conversation about landscape painting, expanding beyond the use of traditional materials by incorporating mirrors as painting surfaces, inserting the viewers into the negative spaces and gaps between paint. She will reference the Ragdale setting – the historic campus and the acres of prairie, and its proximity to Lake Michigan – as the catalyst from which to draw, paint and analyze the ephemeral qualities and intimate relationships between these landscape elements and experiment with the physical properties of paint, subtle nuances of color, probing the tension between surface and space in such a way as to defamiliarize the experience of perception.
Gates spent her formative years between rural southwest Michigan and a small town in northwestern Missouri. She went on to complete her master’s degree before moving to the Chicago area. She currently lives and paints in Rockford, Illinois.
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