Meet the Roanoke Artist Duo Getting Flush Off Paintings of Local Toilets

Roanoke artists Josh and Libby Nolan-Shafer have been on a roll.

Last month, city dignitaries presided over a ribbon cutting for the couple’s latest mural, which graces an office building along the greenway near Peters Creek Road. In recent years, their paintings have popped up along walls near the City Market Building and Golden Cactus Brewing.

But they’ve wasted no time in promoting more portable works of art. While murals remain the Nolan-Shafers’ number one priority, the couple has found surprise best-sellers in their number two.

“I don’t think we realized how many people would like the toilets,” Josh said one afternoon at a bathroom-themed makers market hosted by plant shop Gatewood Rose. “We had other stuff, but now we pretty much just sell toilets.”

Collectors have been snapping up Josh’s acrylic paintings, which measure roughly a foot square and smaller, of local toilets. Since he began selling them last fall, Josh estimates they’ve sold about 60 paintings, many of which are destined for buyers’ powder rooms. Painted on wood blocks, the images often depict toilets in contrasting pastel shades and are priced in the $50 range.

“They’re quick, you can make them abstract, and I think they’re interesting-looking,” Josh said.

Josh grew up in Kansas and attended art school there, where an assignment to “paint something in the building” marked his first foray into toilet paintings, he recalled.

Just before the pandemic, Josh, 28, moved from Colorado to Roanoke, where Libby, 27, has lived for about a decade. The couple got married on the patio outside Gatewood Rose, which is bathed in a Nolan-Shafer original mural.

Part of the toilet paintings’ appeal to Roanokers is their local origin story. Josh takes inspiration from an Instagram account called “Roanoke Toilets,” which depicts famed and lesser-known thrones across the city — from a trough at Fork in the Market to an automatic flusher at the Berglund Center. The Instagram account’s promise is “Bringing you Roanoke, Va’s best shit posts.”

Gabrielle King owns two toilet paintings. One hangs, of course, in her bathroom. The other lives in her basement studio, where she makes pottery.

“I don't think anyone looks at them as an art form,” King said. “So then when Josh started making them, I think it really opened up a lot of eyes, just to see the beauty in toilets and then the beauty in bathrooms.”

“Whenever we all go to the bathroom, it's like a quiet space, it’s like the one place we have alone time,” King added. “So whenever I look at my toilet paintings, I feel really calm.”

King sells pottery and earrings through her business, The Slap Shop, at pop-up markets. She began selling alongside the Nolan-Shafers at events late last year, including at The Dickens of A Christmas festival.

The Nolan-Shafers began selling Josh’s toilet paintings last fall and say their popularity has outstripped their expectations.

Since around that time, Jessica Downs, the owner of Gatewood Rose, has organized seasonal makers markets featuring local artisans. The community has grown from about 14 sellers when it first started to 44 at the most recent market last month, she said.

The Nolan-Shafers” really fit the vibe that we were going for,” Downs recalled. “The makers market here, it’s all Roanoke, local artists, and they were just the perfect example of that.”

A couple weeks ago, Downs hosted a “Bathroom Art Event” at Gatewood Rose. The impetus was to repaint the shop’s bathroom, which vendors frequently used.

“I've always been really embarrassed by the bathroom,” Downs said. “It was just like graffiti saying really bad things about Betty White. And it was just really weird and scary.”

Artist Maggie Perrin-Key — who completed the recent mural along the greenway along with the Nolan-Shafers — painted the bathroom’s interior. King sold pottery. The Nolan-Shafers sold toilet paintings.

“I really like Josh's style. I like how simple it is. I like the color palettes that it uses,” Downs said. “And what he's doing, it just doesn't look like anything else that I've seen.”

While toilets may have captured the hearts and minds of Roanoke artists, the Nolan-Shafers hope they can continue to bring more public art to the community, particularly in rural areas. The couple recently finished a mural in Saltville, a town in Smyth and Washington counties.

“Really, there isn't a lot of public art featuring and highlighting Appalachia in a positive way,” Libby said. The mural on the greenway — along the exterior of Barrows, Inc., an office furniture store — features native plants, animals and abstract human figures hiking, sight-seeing and playing music.

The mural is “highlighting how beautiful and wonderful the community is and how honored we should be to live in this area,” Libby said.

Still, the toilet paintings have struck an intimate chord with the couple’s friends.

“I spend a lot of time in the bathroom, as does everybody else, and you need something nice to look at,” Downs said. “And when he did the ones with plants, I knew that I had to have it, and it was in a color palette that perfectly matched my powder room in my house. And I went for it.”