Nüart Gallery’s current two-person exhibition, Distillations, features new works by painters Kevin Tolman and Anne Kaferle. In this new body of work, both artists’ paintings are directly and indirectly informed by their surroundings and wider landscapes. Both painters intentionally invoke spontaneity, where accident and meditation help them to abstract the natural world from which they draw their inspiration. In Tolman’s mixed-media paintings, the artist’s close observation of his immediate environment creates an almost synesthetic richness to his abstract compositions. The accumulation of texture, pattern, form, line, and saturated color passages all layer and counterpoint each other on his canvas, giving the work the feeling of being in conversation with the unfolding of the natural world. Anne Kaferle’s plein air oil paintings are also abstractions of the natural world, but where Tolman’s work has a percussive and sensual immediacy, Kaferle’s panoramic vistas are serene, atmospheric meditations on deep time. The work is a visual call-and-response between the Southwestern landscape and the artist’s personal experience of the land, which give Kaferle’s paintings the feeling of being almost visual echoes of the landscape she’s observing.
