Existing comment:
RETURN TO FIGURATION
Gates never gave up his attachment to naturalism, even as his work in the late 50s to early 60s focused on increasingly large scale and highly abstracted figures and landscapes. In paintings like Tarascan from 1958, Gates' paint is thickly applied, at once gestural and beautifully descriptive. The paint evokes the look and feel of the indigenous people of Central Mexico, their light and surrounding landscape. When discussing Gates' work, it is likely our concern with Abstraction vs. Realism has set up a false dichotomy. The triumph of Gates' art is that he moved freely between the two modes, and then successfully merged them in his late work.
Gates was completely aware of the artworld around him. As a primary force in American University's Watkins Gallery and the off-campus cooperative Jefferson Place Gallery in the 1950s and 1960s, Gates was one of those responsible for introducing the most avant-garde artists to a Washington audience, including the very first exhibitions of Washington Color School painters. Even as he was presenting the most "advanced" art, by the mid-60s his paintings were moving away from abstraction and back towards realism.
That a painter is influenced by Nature is obvious. That he should also be influenced by art is necessary, for in art are the means of understanding Nature. We see great forces at work, great rhythms and cycles, a continuous conflict of movement and stability, activity and rest - influences of one force on a greater or smaller force. Earth, water, air, light, heat, and the plants and animals, all this life and these processes change and evolve around us and we must, and do, change with them. The painter then, searching with paint, somehow tries to find their equivalent in terms of line, mass and color.
It is ironic that Gates' seemingly most abstract work, his paintings. executed while in Iraq on a grant from the Department of State from September 1966 to February 1967, were also his most realistic. The sun, shimmering off the desert floor, was dematerializing the landscape before his eyes. Masses of color seem to float above and below the horizon in these Rothko-esque optical illusions. It is instructive that the gorgeously convincing Landscape with Pear Tree, on loan from The Phillips Collection, was painted in 1965, two years before Orange Desert, when his return to realism was already well under way. |