Santa Fe, NM KEVIN TOLMAN Sense of Place
Kevin Tolman’s connection to nature is visceral. He references the seasons and their changes in his work and follows them in his life. On the winter solstice, he “went out and marked where the sun came up, and went out and marked where the sun went down on that very shortest of days. That gave me the direction to orient the studio for best solar gain when the sun is lowest in the sky.”
He says, “Our world is an incredibly layered and thickly complex place that I find to be amazingly interesting and sometimes exquisitely beautiful…As my paintings have slowly evolved over the years, there has been a continuous and underlying source of inspiration
to be found in the more cyclical characteristics of our natural world…I also have come to feel that it is the amazingly thick, prolific and prodigious aspect of nature that inspires me the most, and that I think my paintings reflect this rather well. What thrills me is the odd and seemingly unorganized vibrating chaotic continuum that I see every single day when outdoors. Even just outside my door there is something always going on...and the closer one looks, the more intricate and beautiful it all seems to become. To a great extent, it is this world which is changed and organized throughout the year by what we know as the seasons.”
His paintings reflect the changes that occur during
their creation—layers built up partly with intention and partly with what he calls “randomness and accidents.” Just as we may approach a tree from afar and admire the overall form, we’re drawn closer to see the details of the leaves and the bark. Tolman’s paintings invite the same kind of close inspection—as well as admiration from afar. They are worlds of mark making, both deliberate and accidental, both clear and masked, periods of thinking and periods of non-thinking. As the dialogue between artist and object intensifies during the process of creation, the paintings become “abstract worlds that I live with intensely and at times come to almost fully inhabit.”
Autumnal Equinox—The Four Directions is in his exhibition Sense of Place at Nüart Gallery in Santa Fe, New Mexico, July 19 through August 4. Grounded in the change of seasons, it embodies the process of its creation from its layering to the running paint, which responded when fresh to the force of gravity.
The natural historian David Attenborough wrote, “It seems to me that the natural world is the greatest source of excitement; the greatest source of visual beauty; the greatest source of intellectual interest. It is the greatest source of so much in life that makes life worth living.”