Rhonda Gates Paintings

March 2026

Clouds and Light Turning Toward Spring

Spending Time with the Paintings in Beneath Hyperion’s Sky

March has a distinct quality in the Midwest. Winter is still present, but its hold is loosening. Light shifts from day to day. The sky changes even before the temperature does. It’s a time when small transitions become easier to notice.

That sense of transition shapes the experience of Beneath Hyperion’s Sky, now in its final weeks at Zolla Lieberman Gallery, on view through March 21.

Paintings Shaped by Watching the World

The paintings in this show come from extended time outdoors. Watching light move across land. Paying attention to weather. Noticing how the sky changes even when you remain in one place.

They aren’t representations of specific locations. Instead, they hold familiar experiences. Clouds gathering. Light breaking through. The sense that something is unfolding even when the moment is quiet.

Two paintings in the exhibition draw from mammatus clouds, the kind that appear just before a storm. They gather low and heavy, their shapes swelling and shifting as the sky seems to turn inward on itself. There’s often a moment when everything feels charged but unresolved, when the air is full and waiting.

In Mammatus Holding Its Breath, that moment lingers. The painting carries the sense of a pause, as if the sky has taken in a breath and not yet decided what comes next. Movement is there, but it’s restrained. Energy gathers quietly, without display. Even a brief look can register that balance, the way the surface holds tension without releasing it.

The Sky Raises Its Mammatus Fists approaches the same moment from another angle. Here the cloud forms feel more insistent, pressing upward and outward. The sky seems to push back. Together, the two paintings sit within the same stretch of weather, one holding still, the other beginning to respond. Between them, there’s a feeling many people recognize: that shift when anticipation gives way to action, when change starts to show itself.

Nearby, The Oak Tree Hailing the Rain brings that sense of change down to ground level. Seen as if through a rain-streaked window, the oak softens and blurs. Light and water move across its branches, which lift and dissolve as though answering what’s falling around them. The scene feels filtered, less like a clear view and more like a memory forming in real time.

Taken together, these works sit within the same unfolding moment. The sky gathering itself. The storm beginning to move. The land responding. Rather than fixing a single instant, the paintings allow these states to exist side by side, offering a place to notice how anticipation, movement, and presence can overlap, even briefly.

How the Paintings Are Experienced

People move between works, noticing small connections as they go. Others return to the same painting later in the visit, or even on another day. Light shifts in the room. Distance changes what comes forward. What first appears restrained can begin to feel more layered, even across short encounters.

This gradual unfolding has also shaped the exhibition itself. As the weeks have passed, several paintings have already found new homes beyond the gallery. For now, they remain together on the walls, making this one of the few remaining opportunities to experience the full body of work as it was conceived, before the exhibition closes and the paintings move on.

Seeing the show in person doesn’t require setting aside a large block of time. It simply means encountering the work as it exists now, shaped by light, season, and presence.

Some paintings remain separate from the rooms they occupy. Others quietly participate in the space itself.

Visitors often notice that rooms shaped by work like this feel easy to enter and easy to leave. Conversations continue. Attention moves and returns. Nothing competes for focus, yet focus feels available whenever you want it.

It’s the kind of experience many people associate with living with art, even if they don’t use those words.

An Open Invitation

There’s no single conclusion to draw from Beneath Hyperion’s Sky. The paintings don’t ask to be figured out, and they don’t ask for sustained concentration.

They offer something simpler. A pause. A chance to look without urgency. An opportunity to notice what happens when you give yourself a little space, even briefly.

What might you notice if you let yourself stop in for a few minutes?

The exhibition remains on view through March 21. As winter gives way to spring, the work continues to shift with the light and with the people moving through the space.

You’re invited to come experience the paintings in whatever way fits your day.

Sometimes that’s enough.

Blog Archive