June 4, 2026
Christine Rasmussen
How the Light Gets In
Billis / Williams Gallery
May 9 - June 6, 2026
Christine Rasmussen
The light in Los Angeles is often magical. There is something special about the way the sun illuminates buildings, casting long shadows on facades, be it late in the day or early in the morning. This light can be inspiring, resulting in a quiet moment of reflection. Christine Rasmussen is an artist who looks intently at sunlight. She appreciates the stillness it evokes, and captures its beauty, separating it from the hustle and bustle of urban life.
In her subtle and evocative oils, Rasmussen documents the changing light as it illuminates tall, generic, industrial buildings. She crops and fragments these structures, creating abstract compositions filled with colorful, geometric shapes surrounded by sky. Her paintings often include windows — with and without reflections — in myriad shades of blue. Her simplified forms become meditations on color and repetition. Rasmussen describes the architectural spaces depicted in her works as "in-betweens." She states, "In an era of constant motion and overstimulation, my quiet and spacious oil paintings offer a pause. In this respite, I contemplate notions of attention, stillness, uncertainty and the sublime."
Throughlines (all works 2026) is a large painting that depicts part of a facade from a bygone era. Rasmussen crops the scene to focus on the windows, creating a purposely off kilter grid of twenty-eight rectangles in varying shades of blue. Each window (or rectangle) is surrounded by a dark-brown frame that articulates the boundary of the glass. These rectangles become small, self-contained abstract compositions. Some of the windows include reflections or clouds, while others have horizontal wires from unseen utility poles cutting across the image. In a four panel suite of smaller oils titled Reflections, Rasmussen duplicates four of the windows from the center of Throughlines, presenting them as individual paintings. It is interesting to go back and forth between the works, comparing the subtle differences in the depicted reflections.
Across a series of five works, Meditation (1-5), Rasmussen paints the top portion of a building that is shown in three-quarter view. The structure begins at the bottom edge of the canvas and fills less than half of the vertically oriented composition. On the right side of each image is a dark strip of blue that frames the building and suggests the vantage point is from a distance, perhaps looking through another window. The rest of the painting is made up of sky. Rasmussen carefully details the windows located at the top and includes the necessary separators and shadows that define them as "windows" rather than just rectangles. These five paintings form a beautiful sequence that charts the subtle transitions in light and color at different times of the day.
While none of Rasmussen's buildings are identified by location or include people or signage, they feel familiar. In her depictions, the where is less important than the when, as her concern is not to document the specificities of urban architecture, but rather to focus on shapes and the way light bounces off of surfaces. Rasmussen's palette is made up of hues of blue with accents of pink, green and yellow. She excels at creating abstractions that are still identifiable as structures. Whether large or small, her paintings are filled with depth, and evoke a sense of place even when the images are reduced to compositions of rectangles and triangles. The works are more suggestive and impressionistic than realistic, but that is what gives them their uniqueness and appeal.
How the Light Gets In
Billis / Williams Gallery
May 9 - June 6, 2026
Christine Rasmussen
The light in Los Angeles is often magical. There is something special about the way the sun illuminates buildings, casting long shadows on facades, be it late in the day or early in the morning. This light can be inspiring, resulting in a quiet moment of reflection. Christine Rasmussen is an artist who looks intently at sunlight. She appreciates the stillness it evokes, and captures its beauty, separating it from the hustle and bustle of urban life.
In her subtle and evocative oils, Rasmussen documents the changing light as it illuminates tall, generic, industrial buildings. She crops and fragments these structures, creating abstract compositions filled with colorful, geometric shapes surrounded by sky. Her paintings often include windows — with and without reflections — in myriad shades of blue. Her simplified forms become meditations on color and repetition. Rasmussen describes the architectural spaces depicted in her works as "in-betweens." She states, "In an era of constant motion and overstimulation, my quiet and spacious oil paintings offer a pause. In this respite, I contemplate notions of attention, stillness, uncertainty and the sublime."
Throughlines (all works 2026) is a large painting that depicts part of a facade from a bygone era. Rasmussen crops the scene to focus on the windows, creating a purposely off kilter grid of twenty-eight rectangles in varying shades of blue. Each window (or rectangle) is surrounded by a dark-brown frame that articulates the boundary of the glass. These rectangles become small, self-contained abstract compositions. Some of the windows include reflections or clouds, while others have horizontal wires from unseen utility poles cutting across the image. In a four panel suite of smaller oils titled Reflections, Rasmussen duplicates four of the windows from the center of Throughlines, presenting them as individual paintings. It is interesting to go back and forth between the works, comparing the subtle differences in the depicted reflections.
Across a series of five works, Meditation (1-5), Rasmussen paints the top portion of a building that is shown in three-quarter view. The structure begins at the bottom edge of the canvas and fills less than half of the vertically oriented composition. On the right side of each image is a dark strip of blue that frames the building and suggests the vantage point is from a distance, perhaps looking through another window. The rest of the painting is made up of sky. Rasmussen carefully details the windows located at the top and includes the necessary separators and shadows that define them as "windows" rather than just rectangles. These five paintings form a beautiful sequence that charts the subtle transitions in light and color at different times of the day.
While none of Rasmussen's buildings are identified by location or include people or signage, they feel familiar. In her depictions, the where is less important than the when, as her concern is not to document the specificities of urban architecture, but rather to focus on shapes and the way light bounces off of surfaces. Rasmussen's palette is made up of hues of blue with accents of pink, green and yellow. She excels at creating abstractions that are still identifiable as structures. Whether large or small, her paintings are filled with depth, and evoke a sense of place even when the images are reduced to compositions of rectangles and triangles. The works are more suggestive and impressionistic than realistic, but that is what gives them their uniqueness and appeal.