Richard Gate

Fisherman and artist Richard Gate makes mixed-media paintings on birch wood panels and paper, full of references to science, history, art, and nature, especially the divergent landscapes that he calls home: the lush lake country of northwestern Ontario and the austere red rock deserts of southern Utah. Incorporating his avocation, fishing, into all of his work, he populates his compositions with silhouetted fish and delicately illustrated insects. These share the space of his square- and circular-shaped panels with renderings of the Native American hieroglyphs that he observes on the sides of Utah’s rocky cliffs. Delicate patches of tissue paper, brightly colored geometric shapes, Op Art and textile patterns, photo-transfers of scientific illustrations, and images of flora and fauna round out Gate’s paintings, compendiums of the fragments of information that compose our knowledge of the world.