Santa Fe | Kevin Tolman: Notes to Myself

(SANTA FE, NM) Nüart Gallery is pleased to present Notes to Myself, a solo exhibition of new paintings by Kevin Tolman, on view from August 28 – September 19, 2026, with an opening reception on Friday, August 28, from 5:00–7:00 PM.

Kevin Tolman: Notes to Myself

Nüart Gallery is pleased to present Notes to Myself, a solo exhibition featuring new paintings by Kevin Tolman.

Kevin Tolman’s paintings are grounded in a dedicated attention to the natural world, though rarely through direct representation. The trees and fallen leaves surrounding his home, the creek running along his property, and the rocky coastline of Portugal, where he returns regularly to work, enter the paintings as experiences of atmosphere, rhythm, and spatial interval. Broad fields of ochre, gray, blue, and earthen color establish an environmental presence across the surface, within which geometric fragments, arcs, lines, drips, and small incidents emerge. These elements do not so much sit upon a background as inhabit it, appearing at different densities and intervals, much as forms are encountered within a landscape.

Space is particularly important to Tolman’s compositions. Large passages of color are allowed to remain open and relatively quiet, giving individual marks an unusual degree of presence. A dark semicircle, an abbreviated line, a cluster of strokes, or a small interruption in the surface can become momentarily distinct before receding again into the larger field. The paintings move between these moments of concentration and openness, creating a visual rhythm. Nature is present less as subject matter than as a way of organizing the experience: through repetition and variation, proximity and distance, stillness and activity.

Over years of sustained practice, Tolman has developed a visual vocabulary that is distinctly his own, carrying associations from one painting to another while remaining open to new relationships. The apparent ease of the compositions belies their precision; very little is required for the atmosphere of a painting to shift. A change in scale, the placement of a line, or the introduction of a small area of color can alter the balance of the entire field.

The title Notes to Myself emerges from Tolman’s habit of living with paintings for extended periods, often keeping a group of works together in the studio for months. As he looks at them individually and in relation to one another, a dialogue develops: a form discovered in one painting may reappear at another scale, a small gesture may initiate a new work, or an unexpected relationship may suggest an entirely different direction. Each painting becomes both a completed work and a form of visual notation, preserving observations and discoveries that can be carried forward into the next.

Tolman has described his paintings as something akin to diaries, time capsules, and souvenirs of places experienced. Yet what they preserve is less a record of particular events than a way of noticing them. Experiences of landscape, travel, memory, and the studio are absorbed into the work and transformed into color, interval, mark, and space. Notes to Myself brings these accumulated observations together in paintings that remain open and quietly animated, shaped by Tolman’s conviction that the simple act of paying attention has value in itself.

Nüart Gallery
670 Canyon Road
Santa Fe, NM

Gallery Hours
Daily | 10:00 AM–5:00 PM

For more information or images, please contact:
505.988.3888
fineart@nuartgallery.com