(Gabriel LTA. Photo by Jeff Spry)
Gabriel LTA Reimagines Bend’s Art Scene
Conjuring up rich vivid imagery, Bend artist Gabriel van Eikeren, AKA Gabriel LTA (Like The Angel), is fearless when it comes to creating imaginative paintings of surreal essences. A longtime resident of Bend, van Eikeren’s new artHouse LTA gallery on NW Minnesota just held its grand opening in November and it’s already a must-stop destination to chat with the soft-spoken artist and absorb the abstract onslaught of brilliant colors in his large-scale canvas works.
“I’ve always been a recording artist for 15 years and I met a friend named Katie Banks and she would paint while I made music, so then I started picking up the paintbrush,” he tells Cascade A&E Magazine. “It became therapeutic for me. I have no chill, so for me to find something therapeutic, I began to settle down a bit and take things slower. That was really important for me. From there, I wanted some dope s**t to put on my walls.”
As a self-taught artist, van Eikeren never formally studied color theory and instead allows his intuitions and instincts to guide him in exploring the brilliant eruptions of warm and cool layered tones that formulate these emotional abstract compositions.
“I’ve always been somebody who can put together an outfit. It’s just what colors go together. I’ve always wanted to speak loudly through whatever I wore. I grew up in a household where expression wasn’t fondly looked at. So to find another way of expressing myself was huge.
“My father passed in April, and it was on his deathbed that he saw me for the first time. He moved here when he was 15 and couldn’t speak English, and eventually became an Ivy League professor. For him to finally notice my intelligence in a different way was big and changed the way I feel about him. It was my girl who told me, ‘Everybody wants to support you, but they’re waiting for you to make your move.’ And that’s what sparked the gallery. I used to work right here on the corner of Bond and walked to Kenwood to play basketball every day. I grew up in the city. Downtown Bend is kind of central to my heart.”
Shifting the status quo of Bend’s largely western landscape art offerings is a quest to be accepted by only the brave and the bold, and van Eikeren is certainly up to the challenge. “Large-scale works is what I enjoy,” he adds. “I felt like it was initially more of a margin for error — and I have a decent amount of wall space, so I needed to fill that up.
“I use all acrylics; I’m not patient enough for oils. I spend a lot of time with a blow-dryer in my hand and love the fact that it dries quickly and I can layer it. I’m always working on three to four paintings at once. In my house, I have two art studios, one in the kitchen and one in the garage. I usually spend my time pacing back and forth and working on multiple works at once.
“I take a lot of influence from nature, even though I’ve only recently started doing landscapes. I had an album called Earth and Sky and that’s kind of what the ‘angelphant’ motif represents. One is grounded and hard to move, and an angel takes it somewhere. This art is for people tired of the pretentious and stuffy galleries of Bend’s past. Someone who’s looking for something you’d find in L.A. or Portland or New York. I see it as symbolic of where I’m trying to take Bend.”
Van Eikeren’s artHouse LTA gallery is located at 113 NW Minnesota Ave. in downtown Bend.