Rhonda Gates split her formative years between rural Michigan and northwestern Missouri. After completing her master’s degree, she moved to the Chicago area and began to articulate her unique “millenial painter’s” perspective.
With the medium of oil paint, she portrayed landscapes as an increasingly distilled glimpse from a controlled viewing framework. Her creative perspective was furthered by the observation of people’s decreased interaction with nature, due in part to the hyper-proliferation and convenience of technology which allows people to view the world through devices rather than engage in direct experience.
Gates has found that her moments spent immersed in actual expansive wild space were filled with the lilt of excitement tinged with a subtle, dark current of trepidation and anxiety. These feelings engendered by direct immersion are in stark contrast to the rapturous moments spent observing a fleeting effects of various natural phenomena observed from the relative safety of the lens of her car window while commuting, or through her living room window while enjoying a morning cup of coffee, currently while residing outside Rockford, Illinois, with her husband, dog, cat and 2 stepsons.