Compass: Los Angeles

Gay Summer Rick paints iconic urban coastal landscapes, from Los Angeles to New York City, rendered with a keen sense of place and a flair for abstraction. Sparsely populated though replete with objects and evidence of the built environment, her poetic, palimpsestic aesthetic yields scenes that are at once dreamlike and familiar, painterly, evocative, and emotionally resonant. The resplendent calm of her highway and byway sojourns claims influences from Diebenkorn to Rothko and Turner; resulting in expressive, mottled surface qualities that thwart photographic reproduction. Revealing an unexpected beauty in commonplace elements within the urban landscape, her unique style is a melding of impressionism and color-field painting describing the quiet vibration of life where the city meets the sea.