Rob Pruitt’s gradient paintings began with a desire to move beyond found imagery and invent characters of his own. Initially, he paired rapidly drawn, expressive faces with sprayed fields of color, using gradients to suggest different moods and emotional states. Over time, the faces disappeared, leaving the color fields to stand alone. Pruitt began to see these paintings as portals or windows onto another dimension, a direction he explored in his "Suicide Paintings" before turning to the more familiar spectacle of sunsets and changing daylight.

His subsequent "Month of Sunsets" works tracked the sky across an entire month, with each panel representing a different sunset. Across these evolving projects, Pruitt returns to a deceptively simple idea: however different our individual lives may be, we all live beneath the same sky. His gradients offer a vivid, artificial rendering of nature’s light show, at once an image of shared experience and, as Pruitt wryly observes, an ideal backdrop for a selfie.