Muralist turned abstractionist launches spring show at BlackBird
As a child growing up in Wichita, Kansas, Josh Tripoli played a game with his grandparents called “scribble drawing.” The premise was simple: One person would hastily doodle some spirals, swirls, and other abstract forms. Then, another person would transform those unique marks into something figurative, like a polished gentleman wearing a top hat or an alien life form sent from Mars.
“We would do this back and forth for what seemed like hours,” Tripoli remembers. “[It] was foundational to nurturing my creativity and flexing my imagination.”
Inspired by an early love of drawing, Tripoli attended an art magnet high school. However, it wasn’t until many years later, when he was on a far different path — he’d become a medical assistant and was working at an orthopedic clinic — that Tripoli realized he wanted to pursue art full time.
“Once I came to this realization, I shifted my priorities fully to art making, and my life changed dramatically for the better,” he says.
Portrait by Rachel Pressley
After leaving the medical field behind, Tripoli apprenticed under Wichita artist Steve Murillo and founded an art business called Lupoli Collective with his partner Rebekah Lewis. Together, the young couple designed posters for community events, illustrated festival maps, and painted several dozen murals around Wichita, including 20 at the Riverfront Baseball Stadium.
But in 2021, they left their company behind to move to Asheville, a creative locale that “ticked all the right boxes.”
Now settled in the mountains, Tripoli shares his time between BlackBird Frame & Art, where he works as a professional picture framer, and his studio, where he creates in two markedly distinct styles. (His work at Foundation Studios in the River Arts District was destroyed in last year’s catastrophic storm.)
For his representational pieces, Tripoli uses charcoal, paint, and other media to render the human form, although his work is never purely figurative. “It often strikes a midpoint … resulting in a more surreal kind of imagery. A head, eyes, teeth, arms, legs — these are abstracted, simplified, repeated, or juxtaposed in a way that allows for great creative freedom,” he says. “This middle ground emboldens the subconscious.”
But that’s not to say Tripoli’s abstract paintings don’t convey their own emotion. It’s just “stripped down” and “raw,” he explains.
To create these newer pieces, Tripoli makes unique marks across the entire surface of the canvas. This first layer informs the second layer, and the third layer the fourth layer, and so on, “until a certain point of density that often prompts a shift to oil paints, richer colors, and thicker impasto mark making,” the artist notes.
“It then becomes a dance between the finest details, subtle color shifts, compositional balance, and deep spatial rest, in spite of the teeming multitudes at the surface,” he further states.
This process is an active meditation for the artist.
“Each mark, daub, [and] splash of paint is my mantra toward the same spiritual ends,” he says. “Being mindful during this process naturally leads one on a journey toward greater self-awareness, even revelation, all recorded on the canvas along the way.”
Josh Tripoli, Asheville. Tripoli is represented by BlackBird Frame & Art (365 Merrimon Ave., Asheville, blackbirdframe.com). This spring, Tripoli will present Mantra, a solo showcase, at BlackBird. The exhibit runs from May 2-June 28, with an opening reception on Friday, May 2, 6-8pm. For more information, visit joshtripoli.com.