The last show at Olyphant Art Supply in Olympia before they close their present location and move to another spot in the heart of downtown features six paintings and one ink drawing by Tavner Castle.

The brothers who run Olyphant seem to have a knack for discovering talented new artists, or at least artists who are new to me. Castle is no exception. There is something about his paintings that I can't quite explain but which I find to be attractive. They look gritty, as if they've been rubbed in charcoal dust and shaken off, but a lot of the dust has stuck. They are anything but conventionally pretty. His more abstract paintings look like free-flowing lines a la Willem de Kooning and drips and splatters a la Jackson Pollock superimposed over pieces of old wallboard with multiple layers of paint.

Some of the paintings are figurative and some are based on landscape, and all are abstract to varying degrees. He paints with combinations of house paint, acrylics and charcoal on canvases that are mounted with ragged edges in black shadow-box frames. In at least one of his paintings the rough canvas overlaps the frame in places, and I wish he had done that with some of the others because it is fitting with his style.

All of the shapes in his paintings are defined by black lines that are staccato, rough, jagged. He also has intriguing titles.

"Half Inch Cubes, 2 Lbs. Beef" is an abstract city skyline above an animal carcass (or maybe a sleeping polar bear). "Black Hills" and "Environmental Dilapidation" are both landscape-based abstracts with webs and skeins of splattered paint interspersed with his jagged black lines. "Epiphany for a Dead Hare" - how's that for a great title? - is a scratchy abstract figure with heavy black lines. His sooty look reaches a peak in this one.

One thing I like about his paintings with the exception of "Dynamo," which is different from the rest, is that the colors are not confined to forms but freely flow in and out of forms. By way of contrast, "Dynamo" is a figure of a partially nude, large-breasted woman with pink skin and a yellow background in paint, pastel and crayon on paper. In this one the figure is more clearly defined and the overall look is not so gritty as the others. It looks like a milder, less threatening version of de Kooning's "Woman I. "?Totally different from all the others is the ink drawing, "Heroine Kid," a somewhat surrealistic rendering of a man helping a kid shoot up. The lines in this one are more controlled than in the paintings and more detailed. I like the paintings much better.

Castle's works are displayed against a brick wall out in the store instead of in the usual gallery space, which will be closed down earlier in preparation for their move. I've been told that the new space will not include a gallery at first, but that a gallery will be added after some remodeling is completed. I certainly hope so, because the gallery at Olyphant has been a great addition to Olympia's art scene.

PAINTINGS BY TAVNER CASTLE, 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Monday-Saturday, noon to 5 p.m. Sunday, through June 30, Olyphant Art Supply, 117 Washington St. NE, Olympia, 360.556.6703