Rhonda Gates spent her formative years divided between living in rural southwest Michigan and northwestern small-town Missouri. After completing her master’s degree, she moved to the Chicago area and began to articulate her unique “millennial painter’s” perspective.

Gates has been described as a millenial painter, her paintings inspired by the fleeting glimpses of landscapes and nature presented as reflections off the glass and steel skyscrapers of downtown Chicago. 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 it first-hand.

Her surfaces have been described as “luscious and juicy”, radiating “a powerful inner light” that beckons the viewer to come closer. The paintings strike a delicate balance between the portrayal or suggestion of spatial depth and the flatness of surface, with simplified or visual shorthand representation of natural forms that serve as screens or road blocks furthering the tension between surface and space.