If you can’t feel the joy in Tamara Gonzales’s paintings, call an ambulance. Her newest body of work (twenty-one paintings made in 2023) spreads across four walls, two of which are hung salon style. The effect of being surrounded by Gonzales’s colorful paintings is overwhelming. To feel the buoyant and rejuvenating energy of spring on a gray day in mid-winter is a profound gift. But this is what Gonzales’s work tends to do, provide uplift, a process wherein the viewer has the chance of elevating to emotional zones that can feel transcendent.

Painters know well the gateway possibilities of the colors they select, and Gonzales is no fussy brush-handler. She works with acrylics, often diluting the paint so that it becomes translucent on the canvas. Her palette is without a murky tone. In paintings such as Clear Blue Sky and Light and Space, the center of the composition is a single color—blue in one, orange in the other—that presents as soft. If it were a voice, it would sing a lullaby. It’s not only the thinness of the paint that helps Gonzales achieve this quality; it’s the manner in which she applies it—with loose strokes that sometimes fall into a rhythm and never appear rushed or inflexible. Read More