Bio
Vera Gates is a contemporary artist working with paint, wax, wood, sand and found objects. Her current body of work explores themes of justice and liberation, through symbolic abstraction. Her iconography includes broken wings and branches, fragments of words and geometric forms.
Vera was raised on a farm in northern Vermont, on land that has been in her family for generations. She grew up working the land and wandering the woods, discovering abandoned buildings and the rusty remains of what was no longer useful or would not burn. This fascination with ruins would form the foundation of Vera’s work, leading her to explore questions of beauty, purpose and meaning.
Moving to California, Vera worked as a cowgirl in Yosemite before eventually making her way to college. She received her formal education in design, with a BS in environmental design from Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo. She studied with sculptor Gary Dwyer and took classes in art, landscape, architecture and engineering as part of a broad curriculum.
After college, Vera moved to San Francisco and pursued a career in landscape architecture. She founded her own firm in 1993 and then co-founded Arterra Landscape Architects in 2003. This award-winning firm specializes in contemporary, sustainable residential design, with projects throughout the Bay Area.
In 2009, Vera began painting studies with Larry Robinson, at Oakdale Studio in San Francisco. The rigor of the studio practice and critiques refined her focus and craft. Her early landscape work featured building ruins, trees and power lines. It was at this time that Vera’s distinctive color palette of orange and blue first emerged.
Vera left Arterra and San Francisco in 2016, determined to find her way as an artist. She returned in the spring of 2017, to present her first one woman show at ArtHaus Gallery and then again at ARCH, in San Francisco. The show featured over twenty-five pieces from her Spirit of Place series, with the work selling to multiple collectors.
Following that show, Vera set out on a one-year sabbatical of travel, study and art exploration. She visited Montreal, London, Rome, Madrid and New York, where she toured museums, galleries and shows. Vera studied art making techniques and alternative use of materials in workshops and classes. She discovered cold wax medium in this period, a material that would radically transform her painting technique.
Vera returned to Vermont and now resides in a cabin on Lake Carmi through the summer months. She uses an old boathouse as her studio, where she paints and draws. She takes inspiration from the bald eagles that live in the trees overhead and the view that stretches all the way into Canada. She still helps out with the chores on the VETAKIAM family farm, nearby.
Upon returning home, Vera met a magical old woman who looked her over and proclaimed “Until this moment I knew not of your existence.” This oracle would inspire a painting series, which explores the idea of interior landscape as self-portrait.
Vera’s work pivoted in 2020, amidst the pandemic and social unrest. Her current series, Shields for Broken Spirits, addresses this reckoning for justice and the deeply felt desire to be free. At nearly thirty pieces, the series is ready to show in the spring of 2022.
Vera now works with oil and cold wax as her primary media, creating large, highly textured paintings. Her work has been included in group shows at Helen Day Art Center in Stowe, Vermont, the Tubac Center of the Arts and On the Edge Contemporary Gallery, in Tubac, Arizona, and at the Raices Taller 222 Gallery, in Tucson, Arizona.
In the winter months, Vera travels and takes up residency in the Sonoran Desert near Tucson, Arizona. She works from her home studio, surrounded by big skies, beautiful mountains and great horned owls.
