Shane Tolbert: Blood Harmony at McClain Gallery

Not long after rolling into Houston, Shane Tolbert headed straight to Poison Girl. Perfectly understandable. If I ever moved away from Houston, I would miss Poison Girl a great deal. Among neighborhood dives, it’s the top banana.

Another thing Tolbert did was photograph his beautiful wife Gina wearing the vintage wedding dress that inspired his painting “Nude, Wedding Dress,” a work displayed in Tolbert’s exhibition “Blood Harmony” at McClain Gallery through October 23, 2021. It took only a second of gawking at the dress and the painting to see the painting relates to its source. Tolbert commented. “Some paintings come to me quickly as this did after Gina came home with an antique wedding dress last month. This painting is about her and us. For the longest time I maintained a steely, cold distance to my subject matter and here I am leaning on personal matters of the heart … Does an audience need to know an artist’s source for a work? No. Do I feel the need to share anyways? Yes.”

Tolbert dithers with paint in unconventional ways. One technique he has used for many years is to plop acrylic paint on sheets of plastic. He allows some to dry, and some, he makes thin and runny. Then assails the canvas with the plastic. The colors and textures that result from combining impressions transferred from plastic with traditional brushstrokes are downright sensuous. Intimations of seduction didn’t escape Sharon Graham and the staff at McClain. The exhibition chatter they published for Tolbert’s 2018 show “Nightshades” conceded Tolbert “plays with and pulls at his medium to create hotly abstract paintings.”

Tolbert moved to Santa Fe in 2017. He just began his fourth year of teaching painting and drawing at Northern New Mexico College. New Mexico’s desert landscape partially inspired his new body of work. So does the patch of garden he created with chard and cabbage and zinnias and sunflowers. A vivid backdrop to this art is the recent death of his father, so don’t discount Tolbert jacking with the mysterious.

What's Your Reaction?

Excited

Happy

In Love

Not Sure

Silly