About the artist
Gabriel van Eikeren, known professionally as Gabriel LTA or Like The Angel, is a self-taught Bend artist who creates large-scale abstract paintings with layered acrylic, reflective gloss, vivid color, and recurring surreal forms.
His paintings combine intuitive color relationships, tactile surfaces, and personal experience to shape the spaces they inhabit. Each work invites multiple interpretations as light, distance, and perspective reveal new details.
Gabriel is the founder of artHouse LTA, an artist-owned contemporary gallery at 113 NW Minnesota Avenue in downtown Bend.
Artist statement
How music shaped his painting
After 15 years as a recording artist, Gabriel discovered painting while watching his friend Katie Banks paint during music sessions. The brush offered a slower, tactile counterpoint to music and a new language for emotion.
Rhythm, layering, contrast, and progression now shape his canvases. Repeated forms pulse across overlapping surfaces, while color and texture create movement within still compositions.
An intuitive, self-taught practice
Gabriel developed his visual language through observation, repetition, and experimentation rather than formal training. His early interest in clothing taught him how color can signal identity, confidence, and mood.
Working primarily in acrylic, he layers warm and cool hues, builds raised textures, applies reflective gloss, and reshapes accidental forms. He often moves between several canvases, allowing each composition to inform the next.
Paintings that transform a space
Gabriel creates statement paintings that anchor interiors rather than recede into them. Their scale, palette, and energy can establish a room’s emotional direction or introduce the contrast needed to complete it.
Nature, memory, and transformation surface throughout the work. His signature angelephant motif, connected to the album Earth and Sky, fuses the grounded strength of an elephant with the elevation of an angel. It embodies the tension between remaining rooted and becoming something new.
Grief, Bend, and artHouse LTA
The loss of Gabriel’s father reshaped his understanding of creativity, identity, and legacy. His father arrived in Bend at 15 without speaking English and later became an Ivy League professor. Near the end of his life, a moment of recognition between father and son helped Gabriel see his own creative path more clearly.
That path led to artHouse LTA on NW Minnesota Avenue. Raised in Bend, Gabriel opened the gallery to bring bold, urban, emotionally direct contemporary art to a city often associated with Western landscapes.
artHouse LTA rejects the idea that galleries must feel restrained or intimidating. The space welcomes collectors, artists, residents, and travelers to encounter work designed to provoke conversation and command attention.
Visit Gabriel at artHouse LTA
Meet Gabriel, view current paintings, attend First Friday exhibitions, and discuss available work at artHouse LTA in downtown Bend.