Michael Tole Figurative Paintings

Michael Tole says of his work… Anyone who knows me knows I’m not much of a football fan, but it’s a big part of our popular culture and its construction of gender and masculinity ma...

Michael Tole says of his work… This painting reimagines the moment when Cleopatra contemplates suicide after her battlefield loss to Octavian. In this revisionist history, Cleopatr...

Michael Tole says of his work… This painting reimagines the moment when Cleopatra contemplates suicide after her battlefield loss to Octavian. In this revisionist history, Cleopatr...

Michael Tole says of his work… My conservative, Church of Christ grandmother lived in a pristine little mid-century modern house in the middle-of-no-where, Texas. Its trim, Protestant exterior belied a decadent mishmash of sculpted chocolate carpeting, and gold gilt Rococo furnishings inside. Strewn about the living room walls were frothy little reproductions of pearly, 18th century goddesses frolicking amid forests and streams--mocking the clean modern lines of the room. These prints of Bouchers and Fragonards were so pretty, so decorative, so innocuous in their style that it didn’t occur to me until years later when I studied them in college that they were lesbian love scenes. In these anodyne fetes, young women roiled, breasts and bottoms abounding, gazed into one another's doe eyes, and caressed fulsome cheeks. Though overtly erotic, their style was so decorative and soft that even my religiously conservative grandmother experienced no cognitive dissonance between the racy content and her religious beliefs. I find this tension between style and content, fascinating. The trio of paintings: The Summit of the Gods...

Michael Tole says of his work… Orientalism was a 19th century movement in European academic art that portrayed the near east. Its near photorealistic st...

Michael Tole says of his work… My conservative, Church of Christ grandmother lived in a pristine little mid-century modern house in the middle-of-no-where, Texas. Its trim, Protestant exterior belied a decadent mishmash of sculpted chocolate carpeting, and gold gilt Rococo furnishings inside. Strewn about the living room walls were frothy little reproductions of pearly, 18th century goddesses frolicking amid forests and streams--mocking the clean modern lines of the room. These prints of Bouchers and Fragonards were so pretty, so decorative, so innocuous in their style that it didn’t occur to me until years later when I studied them in college that they were lesbian love scenes. In these anodyne fetes, young women roiled, breasts and bottoms abounding, gazed into one another's doe eyes, and caressed fulsome cheeks. Though overtly erotic, their style was so decorative and soft that even my religiously conservative grandmother experienced no cognitive dissonance between the racy content and her religious beliefs. I find this tension between style and content, fascinating. The trio of paintings: The Summit of the Gods, Sea Gods, and Modern Marlowe are an exploration of it. I am unaware of any equivalent all male scenes from the Rococo period. This appears to be an inherent bias within the tradition. With this work, I am trying to pry open the tradition and make a space the male figure as decorative--pretty. I say "pretty" instead of "beautiful" because the "beautiful" can be threatening or challenging. "Pretty" is a term we generally apply to unambiguously attractive, comforting, and accepted things: flowers, puppies, babies, etc. I want to know if men can be pretty in the same way those 18th century goddesses are. I think I’ve made a pretty good visual argument for that perception. I'll know I've succeeded if the next generation of grandmas can host their women's bible study group in a living room hung with these paintings. My grandmother likely bought these prints at about the time John Berger coined the truism: “Men act and women appear.” In one sense, this painting is asking if it is possible for men simply to appear, without a narrative justification. The mythological titles of this trio are intentionally vague enough to let the images reside mostly in a non-narrative context, placing emphasis on its aesthetics, not its story. In my current work, The Revisionist Histories, I am writing letters to art history, literature, and mythology in an attempt to reflect the social changes that have reshaped our society over the past century.  As part of this agenda, I explore the evolution of gender norms, power dynamics, and representation within Western visual culture and what this implies for the negotiation between pleasure, justice, and our culturally specific discourse on beauty.    The seed for The Revisionist Histories was sewn when I caught a glimpse of my preteen daughters watching music videos on their iPad as I chopped veggies for dinner.  Out of the corner of my eye I caught glimpses of music videos featuring Beyonce, Taylor Swift, Ariana Grande, Katy Perry, and Doja Cat gyrating across the tiny screen.  A better parent might have snatched the iPad away, but I was overcome with hallucinatory visions of this pop diva...

Michael Tole says of his work… My conservative, Church of Christ grandmother lived in a pristine little mid-century modern house in the middle-of-no-where, Texas. Its trim, Protestant exterior belied a decadent mishmash of sculpted chocolate carpeting, and gold gilt Rococo furnishings inside. Strewn about the living room walls were frothy little reproductions of pearly, 18th century goddesses frolicking amid forests and streams--mocking the clean modern lines of the room. These prints of Bouchers and Fragonards were so pretty, so decorative, so innocuous in their style that it didn’t occur to me until years later when I studied them in college that they were lesbian love scenes. In these anodyne fetes, young women roiled, breasts and bottoms abounding, gazed into one another's doe eyes, and caressed fulsome cheeks. Though overtly erotic, their style was so decorative and soft that even my religiously conservative grandmother experienced no cognitive dissonance between the racy content and her religious beliefs. I find this tension between style and content, fascinating. The trio of paintings: The Summit of the Gods, Sea Gods, and Modern Marlowe are an exploration of it. I am unaware of any equivalent all male scenes from the Rococo period. This appears to be an inherent bias within the tradition. With this work, I am trying to pry open the tradition and make a space the male figure as decorative--pretty. I say "pretty" instead of "beautiful" because the "beautiful" can be threatening or challenging. "Pretty" is a term we generally apply to unambiguously attractive, comforting, and accepted things: flowers, puppies, babies, etc. I want to know if men can be pretty in the same way those 18th century goddesses are. I think I’ve made a pretty good visual argument for that perception. I'll know I've succeeded if the next generation of grandmas can host their women's bible study group in a living room hung with these paintings. My grandmother likely bought these prints at about the time John Berger coined the truism: “Men act and women appear.” In one sense, this painting is asking if it is possible for men simply to appear, without a narrative justification. The mythological titles of this trio are intentionally vague enough to let the images reside mostly in a non-narrative context, placing emphasis on its aesthetics, not its story. In my current work, The Revisionist Histories, I am writing letters to art history, literature, and mythology in an attempt to reflect the social changes that have reshaped our society over the past century.  As part of this agenda, I explore the evolution of gender norms, power dynamics, and representation within Western visual culture and what this implies for the negotiation between pleasure, justice, and our culturally specific discourse on beauty.    The seed for The Revisionist Histories was sewn when I caught a glimpse of my preteen daughters watching music videos on their iPad as I chopped veggies for dinner.  Out of the corner of my eye I caught glimpses of music videos featuring Beyonce, Taylor Swift, Ariana Grande, Katy Perry, and Doja Cat gyrating across the tiny screen.  A better parent might have snatched the iPad away, but I was overcome with hallucinatory visions of this pop diva...

Michael Tole says of his work… The Most Dangerous Game: Nymphs and Satyrs Edition, is a conflation of the short story by Richard Connell and the mythological trope of nymphs and satyrs. In, The Most Dangerous Game, two men hunt each other for sport on a tropical island, creating the most epic, most toxically masculine sport hunt possible. In the classical nymph and satyr trope, lusty satyrs chase nubile nymphs through the woods in a game that varies from playful to predatory depending on the artist. In this revision, it is the nymphs that do the chasing, and they have made common cause with the hunters' quarry to fully turn the tables on the hunter/satyrs. Formally speaking, the painting is an experiment in creating emphasis using color intensity rather than value. The central focal point is distinguished from its surroundings by setting off hot, high intensity colors from a halo of cool pastels. In my current work, The Revisionist Histories, I am writing letters to art history, literature, and mythology in an attempt to reflect the social changes that have reshaped our society over the past century.  As part of this agenda, I explore the evolution of gender norms, power dynamics, and representation within Western visual culture and what this implies for the negotiation between pleasure, justice, and our culturally specific discourse on beauty.    The seed for The Revisionist Histories was sewn when I caught a glimpse of my preteen daughters watching music videos on their iPad as I chopped veggies for dinner.  Out of the corner of my eye I caught glimpses of music videos featuring Beyonce, Taylor Swift, Ariana Grande, Katy Perry, and Doja Cat gyrating across the tiny screen.  A better parent might have snatched the iPad away, but I was overcome with hallucinatory visions of this pop diva...

In my current work, The Revisionist Histories, I am writing letters to art history, literature, and mythology in an attempt to redress past wrongs, re-draw archetypes, and reflect the social changes that have reshaped our society over the past century. As part of this agenda, I explore the evolution of gender norms, power dynamics, and representation within Western visual culture and what this implies for the negotiation between pleasure, justice, and our culturally specific discourse on beauty. Oddly enough, this work is inspired in part by my pre-teen daughters’ growing musical interests which exposed me for the first time to the world of music videos (I had a sheltered childhood as my parents couldn’t afford cable TV). My daughters are primarily interested in pop divas...

This is a comic meditation on interventionism. In my current work, The Revisionist Histories, I am writing letters to art history, literature, and mythology in an attempt to redress...

In my current work, The Revisionist Histories, I am writing letters to art history, literature, and mythology in an attempt to redress past wrongs, re-draw archetypes, and reflect th...

Michael Tole is a figurative painter currently living in Tempe, AZ with his wife and daughters. A Texas native, most of his 20 year long career was spent in Dallas. After relocatin...