It’s always golden hour in Robert Ginder’s Southern California. Shadows are long, lawns and topiary are immaculately maintained, and palm trees abound.
Golden Estates: The House Paintings of Robert Ginder (2025, Hat & Beard Press) features fifty works by the titular artist, each a portrait of a single-family home, either straight on or from a slight oblique angle, as if viewed from a passing car. The structures are modest one-story Spanish and Colonial Revival–style bungalows of the type that are ubiquitous throughout many Southland neighborhoods, characterized by stucco walls and red tile roofs. Such houses are so prevalent in parts of Los Angeles that they can appear rather unremarkable, but Ginder’s “variations” suggest otherwise.
Here, the humble abode becomes an icon, complete with gilded halo. In every case, the stucco bungalow is backgrounded by an aureate sky, rendered in gold leaf on an arched wood panel, evoking both Southern California’s famed quality of light and the magnificence of Byzantium on a single luminous surface. (It’s worth noting that one of th…