Michael Tole’s recent show in Dallas, “Some Queer Noisy Pendulum,” was well timed, opening just a few days after the announcement that he had won the fifty-thousand-dollar Hunting Prize for painting. Tole’s work celebrates everyday visual pleasures; his most recent paintings are based on snapshots of ersatz Fabergé eggs on sale at a gift shop in the Dallas Galleria. An earlier series did the same for gewgaws he photographed in a Cracker Barrel restaurant–cum–gift shop, and he is currently at work on paintings depicting fragmented views from a wax museum.

Tole’s imagery, clearly derived from