Image: Nüart Gallery, Santa Fe
Nüart Gallery has opened ‘Notes to Myself,’ a solo exhibition of new paintings by Kevin Tolman at its Santa Fe gallery. The presentation brings together works shaped by the artist’s sustained attention to the natural world, although the landscapes that inform them rarely appear through direct representation.
The exhibition opened on August 28, 2026, with a reception from 5 to 7 p.m. Mountain Standard Time. Tolman was scheduled to attend the reception. Nüart Gallery’s announcement gives the exhibition dates as August 28 through September 20, while the gallery’s exhibition page lists the closing date as September 19.
According to the gallery, details from the environment around Tolman’s home—including trees, fallen leaves and a nearby creek—enter the paintings as experiences of atmosphere, rhythm and spatial interval. The rocky coastline of Portugal, where the artist regularly returns to work, is another stated point of reference. These sources are transformed into broad fields of ochre, gray, blue and earthen color rather than rendered as recognizable views.
Across those fields, geometric fragments, arcs, lines, drips and smaller incidents appear at varying densities and intervals. The gallery describes these marks as elements that inhabit the painted environment, recalling the way forms are encountered within a landscape. Large passages of relatively quiet color remain open, allowing individual marks—a dark semicircle, an abbreviated line or a cluster of strokes—to come briefly forward before receding into the larger composition.
Space and pacing are central to the works’ organization. Tolman’s paintings move between concentrated areas of activity and more expansive passages, producing a visual rhythm through repetition and variation, proximity and distance, stillness and movement. Nature functions less as subject matter than as a structure for experience, with changes in scale, line placement and color capable of shifting the balance of an entire field.
The title refers to Tolman’s practice of living with groups of paintings in the studio for extended periods, sometimes for months. As the works remain together, forms and gestures can recur across them at different scales or prompt new relationships. In this context, each painting operates both as a completed work and as a visual notation that carries observations into subsequent paintings.
The exhibition includes works listed by the gallery under titles including ‘Carnival of Summer,’ ‘Two Moons,’ ‘Winter Carnival / For Persephone,’ ‘Pedra / By Moonlight,’ ‘Acequia / Summer Song,’ ‘Night & Day’ and ‘The Sun & It’s Spots.’ ‘Notes to Myself’ is presented at Nüart Gallery, 670 Canyon Road, Santa Fe, where gallery hours are listed as daily from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.
