Three Provincetown painters — Trevor Mikula, Josh Wilmoth, and Andy Towle — will be showing new works at the Provincetown Commons starting next week. The concurrent shows open Tuesday, June 25 and will be up for two weeks, with an opening reception on Friday, June 28 from 5 to 8 p.m.

Kindergarten Hustler

“When I was a kid, I would draw animals on butcher paper and take them into kindergarten and sell them,” says Trevor Mikula. “My mom would be like, ‘Why do you have 20 dollars?’ I’m still doing that.”

Mikula is leaning against a rolling table in his studio in the back of his house in the West End. He wears pink-and-purple tie-dyed Nikes, black socks with gray stripes, and a honey mustard Cafe Heaven T-shirt. On the table is his large acrylic painting The Painter Horse. He’s putting the final touches on it.

Mikula will be showing a series of larger paintings in his exhibition “Birdsong” on the right side of the hallway at the Commons. “I love the artists from the ’50s, ’60s, and ’70s,” he says. “Helen Frankenthaler was painting huge.”

Mikula is known for his whimsical paintings. He dips a mechanical pencil into acrylic paint and stipples it onto the canvas as he did to create the vase in Technicolor Flore. The vase is black and stippled in gold. Delicate thin handles on its sides are a signature of the series. His flowers are flat and geometric.

Mikula grew up in an evangelical church community in Spring Hill, Tenn. He shows work at a gallery in Nashville, but he says he doesn’t get back to Spring Hill.

He earned an associate’s degree in graphic design from Nashville Technical College. “Graphic design is why I’m into color and space,” he says.

He moved to Provincetown on Jan. 1, 2013 and opened an eponymous gallery, since closed. He slept on a blow-up mattress on the gallery floor that winter. He currently shows at William-Scott Gallery.

The idea for his show’s name came from a video that features a drag queen singing. He says it was about how birds talk to each other in the morning after making it through the darkest part of the night.

Sexual Identity Crusade

In a little cottage on Point Street, Provincetown artist Josh Wilmoth is preparing for his show, “Male Presenting.” Wilmoth’s paintings will be displayed on the walls of the Urvashi Vaid and Kate Clinton common room.

Wilmoth’s show is in three parts: boy beach landscapes, portraits of markhors — Asian wild goats — dressed in Pakistani bridal jewelry, and a series of male figures, all wearing corsets and women’s lingerie, painted on pillowcases and bedsheets from Provincetown guesthouses.

Wilmoth calls his paintings figurative landscapes. “I’ve been in this town for 10 years, and everyone wants landscapes, but I also love figurative work,” he says. “The sexual identity of Provincetown is so intrinsic but not displayed as much, so that’s my personal crusade.”

For this show, Wilmoth has used only found materials. The picture frames are from the Methodist thrift store. The wood pieces used in the markhor portraits are remnants of past Carnival installations.

In creating the markhor portraits, Wilmoth says, he liked the idea of rendering the masculinity of these alpha male animals ineffective. “I’m using queer aesthetics on masculine presenting animals,” he says. The earrings and the headpieces on the markhors are from images of two different brides. Wilmoth used acrylic and latex in these highly detailed works. Each portrait took him 40 to 50 hours, he says.

“I’m only painting animals with male physiological attributes,” he says. “You’re not going to get a mate with all this ceremonial jewelry on it.” In one painting, Wilmoth used a friend’s bridal veil.

Wilmoth grew up in West Palm Beach, Fla. He graduated from Tufts in 2009 with a degree in biopsychology and Mandarin, and he has an M.F.A. from the Museum of Fine Arts Boston. He moved to Provincetown nine years ago.

Self-Portrait With Lemon

On the other side of the Commons hallway from Mikula’s work, Provincetown poet and artist Andy Towle will show his new paintings. “Who am I? Where am I going? Where do I come from?” he asks, pointing to his painting of a spirit in the dunes. “That’s been a question my whole life because I was adopted.

“There’s something of Romanticism in these paintings,” says Towle in his studio, “and narrative storytelling — it’s not just a picture of a tree.”

Towle uses a second-floor bedroom of his house in the West End for his studio. He started painting in 2018. But it was three years ago, after he left Towleroad, the widely read LGBTQ-focused blog he founded and operated for 18 years, that his practice became more focused.

“I just got really burned out,” he says about running Towleroad. “I would be up at 6 a.m., straight from my bed to the computer, and I wouldn’t stop sometimes until late at night, just staying on top of news.”

For years, Towle was under pressure to keep Towleroad relevant. “I was so tired of blogging about Donald Trump and Covid,” he says. “I was just like: I can’t do this anymore — I have to start making things again and feeding my soul.”

Born in River Forest, Ill., Towle got his B.A. in English and art history at Vassar in 1989. While in college, he published poems in Poetry magazine, The Paris Review, The Yale Review, Christopher Street, Ploughshares, Poetry Northwest, and Manoa. After college, he moved to Stanford University for a Stegner Fellowship in poetry.

He first came to Provincetown as a Fine Arts Work Center fellow in 1991. His second FAWC fellowship in 1995 was for fiction. Before founding Towleroad, he was editor-in-chief of Genre magazine and an editor at large for Out Traveler.

Towle’s paintings capture gay life in Provincetown and include a striking self-portrait in which he holds a lemon. His subjects are contemporary; he captures figures taking selfies with sunsets and imaginary studs bartending at the Atlantic House.

One painting of a night at the Atlantic House brings clarity and definition to a chaotic environment. Towle’s brush spreads a hospitable light over the front bar. The bottles are organized, the bar is clean, except for a spill. Figures are rounded, almost as if they’re floating in a bubble. We see the fine texture of the bar mat and the heavy contrast Towle uses to sculpt the ceiling fixtures above the cash registers.

Towle says Louis Fratino is his favorite artist working today. “I know it’s a cliché to say you’re a fan of Hopper when you live in Provincetown, but, yes, I am,” he says.

Three-Man Show

The event: Works by Trevor Mikula, Andy Towle, and Josh Wilmoth
The time: Tuesday, June 25 through Sunday, July 7; opening reception Friday, June 28, 5 to 8 p.m.
The place: Provincetown Commons, 46 Bradford St.
The cost: Free