Carried interest: Brad Gates' work in Pointillism featured at Edgewood Cottage through Aug. 7

BLOWING ROCK — Sports performance professionals frequently talk about getting in a “zone,” an extremely positive mental state where an athlete is completely connected to his or her performance. After getting in the zone, an athlete perceives that all challenges can be overcome during that particular competition on that particular day. It is a mindset that strongly correlates to superior performance, whether pitching a baseball for a no-hitter or running a marathon for a record-setting time over 26.2 miles.

For Blowing Rock resident Brad Gates, painting is that way. One of this week’s featured artists in the Blowing Rock Historical Society’s Artists in Residence series at Edgewood Cottage, after a highly successful career in business and financial analysis Gates has returned to one of his passions since early childhood.

“Art is that way for me,” said Gates on Aug. 1 in sitting down with The Blowing Rocket. “I start painting a piece and my mind just goes into a zone. It goes places that it otherwise wouldn’t. I see places in my mind’s eye that I otherwise wouldn’t see. I turn some music on and just get lost in my painting. It is almost like meditation. For me, painting is an opportunity to create something that, hopefully, people will think is beautiful, but also just to lose myself in the piece I am creating.”

Creativity is an essential part of Gates’ persona.

“I am big on creating, whether it is woodworking, painting, or whatever. I like making stuff. It is cool to go from something that is total blank and make it into something. I even did that in my financial analysis work,” he said.

Growing up in San Antonio, Texas, the tall, lanky Gates described himself as an Air Force kid.

“I dabbled in various sports in middle school and high school,” he said, “depending on the season. Football, basketball, baseball… but I really settled on golf because my old man was a big golfer and I just gravitated toward what he did.”

From an early age, Gates said that he really enjoyed art, even taking a couple of art classes in high school.

“I have been doing art my entire life. But in high school I had to make a decision about whether I was going to try and do something art-related or not. Ultimately, I decided I wanted to make some money. I was a 16- or 17-year old punk and all I could think about was money. The University of Texas had a great business school, so I decided I would do that,” said Gates. “I grew up in San Antonio, went to Austin for college, then to Houston for a job.”

Gates recalled starting out in valuing equities, but soon branched out into a very specific security called “carried interest” in private equity funds.

“For the manager of a private equity firm, this was important. When a private equity fund is first formed, that carried interest has very little value and unless the fund does well it remains that way. You have a low valuation at the outset, but it could turn into something huge. For estate planning reasons, how you created this security was particularly important because your tax bill could be a fraction of what it would have been doing it differently. I had to develop a way to value this security because it wasn’t in any of the textbooks. So I used my creativity to become the lead in our firm for valuing this type of financial instrument,” Gates explained.

A turning point in Gates life came as his financial analysis professional career was winding down and he got married, honeymooning in Paris.

“We went to the Musée d’Orsay. It is an extraordinary museum.”

In fact, the Musée d’Orsay is one of the largest art museums in Europe, holding mainly French art dating from 1848 to 1914, including paintings, sculptures, furniture, and photography. It houses the largest collection of Impressionist and post-Impressionist masterpieces in the world, including paintings by Monet, Manet, Degas, Renoir, Seurat, Sisley, Gaughin, and Van Gogh, among others.

“It is there that I first saw pointillism and a couple of George Seurat and Paul Signac pieces. They were kind of the developers of pointillism, and I was just mesmerized by them. So, I went home after our honeymoon and gave it a shot. It really stuck with me. I really enjoyed doing it. I didn’t read any books, I just winged it. Since then, all my works are a lot cleaner than those first few, so yeah, I did some research but it was after I started out on my own,” said Gates. “I am all self-taught. I am a little bit like Seurat in that I am enthralled by how the human brain can put together some of these images. Pointillism is just a bunch of dots. How you space them together, how big the dots are…You are able to create an image. For me, it is so fascinating how I can just put a bunch of dots on a piece of paper and the human brain can decipher what I am trying to display.”

Gates explained that Pointillism developed with Impressionism in the late 1800s, in France.

“George Seurat was interested in the science of Pointillism,” Gates said. “He called it divisionism, the interplay of various colors to the human eye. He was interested in that science behind it, how a red and a blue next to each other, how in your mind’s eye they actually create a purple.”

Pointillism became Brad Gates’ preferred artistic style and he chose acrylics as his medium, for two reasons, one practical and the other personal.

“Acrylics dry exceptionally fast. I will do various colors, even 50 different colors in each of my paintings and they are all just dots on my canvas of paper. If I was working with oil, it would take forever for me to do that because those colors would be bleeding into each other. Oils don’t dry very fast. First and foremost, acrylics are amenable to my artistic style. The other reason I do acrylics is that I have really bad asthma. Working with oils and what you cut the oils with… well, they are toxic chemicals and they don’t go well with my asthma,” Gates said, with a knowing chuckle.

Gates said that he is largely a consumer-facing artist, exhibiting and selling his work at art festivals, such as Blowing Rock’s Art in the Park and other art shows both regionally and nationally.

“I choose my subjects by my passions, like the Blue Ridge Parkway. A lot of my work is simply Americana. I have the American flag in there. I have done several bears. My subjects are just what is around me that I enjoy. A lot of music stuff. I painted ‘Bevo,’ the Texas Longhorns’ mascot. What I find beautiful, visually, but what inspires me in other ways, too,” said Gates. “Up here in Blowing Rock, some of these motifs kind of sell themselves. For a painting of the Parkway, for instance, a lot of people coming up here for vacation, they like a piece like that to take home if it resonates with them.”

Gates is one of two artists featured at Edgewood Cottage through Aug. 7. The cottage is open from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. each day and visitors are encouraged to sign in, talk with the artists and ask them questions about their work. Most, if not all of the work being exhibited is available for purchase.