Patina

There's a kind of beauty that only comes with time: the way colors settle and shift, the way a surface gains depth the more layers it holds. MJ Coyle chases that quality on canvas. In Patina, his first solo show in the Harrison Gallery, Coyle builds paintings the way a room earns its character, layer by layer, until something that looks like it's always been there emerges.

Coyle's path to painting runs through interior design. Working on spaces that needed art at a scale or mood he couldn't find anywhere else, he started making the pieces himself, color stories pulled straight out of his head and onto canvas. That instinct followed him through a stint in New York doing visual merchandising for major retail brands, and later onto HGTV's Good Bones, where he and a rotating cast of Indianapolis artists supplied original work for the show. "I really hate going to a house with store-bought art," he says. "It just doesn't feel finished or collected. I wanted to be the anti-that." That drive shows up across his whole career, in and out of the studio. "If I can't find something that I'm looking for," he says, "I will make it myself."

That same instinct drives his process. Coyle works big, building up texture and then painting over it, again and again, until the canvas holds the memory of everything it used to be. His materials range widely from piece to piece: chalk, charcoal, oil, acrylic, even coffee and a shower squeegee found their way into this body of work. "I'll just keep painting on the same canvas till I like what I see," he explains. He considered calling the show Layers, which is technically what's happening, but Patina felt truer to the result, not a record of process, but the look of something aged, something that's been around a while and earned it. There's no single thread tying the show together, and Coyle will tell you there isn't one; certain pieces took unexpected turns mid-process, pulling in new directions until what started as one painting became something else entirely. "It's almost like three shows in one," he says. "There are definitely multiple different stories happening."

His design background shows up less in any single image and more in how he wants the whole show to be experienced. Cole doesn't just paint a piece; he imagines the room it belongs in. "I hope when they see the art, they can picture it in a whole room," he says, "because that's what I'm always doing." It's an instinct other designers have come to rely on, calling him when a space needs something built to its exact dimensions and mood. That same sensibility is built from years of bridging two worlds, hiking through quiet, empty landscapes one week and threading through New York City the next, absorbing color and texture from both extremes. He wants the feeling to arrive first and the meaning, if there is one, to come second. "I want to push what people see or feel when they see the art without it being thrown in their face."

Spend some real time with these paintings; Coyle hopes you will. Look for the texture built up underneath, the colors painted over, and then half-revealed again, the sense of a story that was never meant to be fully told. Patina doesn't ask to be understood all at once. It asks to be lived with, the way the best art in a room does, until it stops feeling like decoration and starts feeling like memory.