About the Series

When I’m painting, I’m often thinking about dualities –- complexity and simplicity, beauty and darkness, expectation and reality, existence and the void. I have synesthesia, so I process complexity visually. To make sense of it all, I like to build up wild fields of color by working the canvases on the floor, and then come back later to impose structure with inky black lines. I often make a crazy mess and then employ “rules” that I see through to completion. I like to create chaos and then create order again; I like to create and break expectation.

I get a special satisfaction from building on the long tradition of female painters capturing the fragile, ecstatic beauty of florals, and I’ve been drawn back to them again and again. I love how flowers create tidy patterns and then abruptly disrupt themselves — it feels like an apt metaphor for, well, everything.

You make plans, and then life happens.  

The Darkbloom Series is a meditation on modern times. It’s about reconciling joy and gratitude with oppression, horror, and pain. I see today’s dualities as gestalt, not zero sum, so this series is about how one intensifies rather than dilutes the other. Darkbloom is me trying to hold all this beauty and darkness at the same time, and then share it with you. It aims to create a superposition between all the dichotomies I see and, in doing so, generate a sense of peace. Like a lens coming in to focus.  

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Darkbloom is a series of large format 4ft x 5ft paintings on museum profile canvas.

If you are struck by the work, please reach out on the contact page or at artist@mschroma.com

About the Artist

Ms. Chroma, aka Allie Gates, is a dreamer based in Berkeley. A proud Californian and self-taught painter, she studied International Development at UCLA and completed graduate studies in Fine Art at the Universidad Nacional de las Artes (UNA) in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Allie has created and sold art in half a dozen countries, drawing inspiration from her ongoing work in social and economic development. She likes to philosophize about what it means to live a good life and spoil her springer spaniel, Gooseberry.

She (thankfully) does not usually refer to herself in the third person.