An article about my work on ArtSlant

Just received notice that an article about me appears on ArtSlant, a global network of art galleries and museums. Check it out at: http://www.artslant.com/sf/articles/show/39383
If you are so inspired, please comment on the article. Thanks! Will

What are we doing to our water? Check out the documentary 'Watermark'.

Here is a trailer for Watermark , a documentary that explores the life force that sustains us all. It tells diverse stories from around the world about our relationship with water: how we are drawn to it, what we learn from it, how we use it and the consequences of that use. 

It opens in theaters on April 18. Check your local listings. It is also available on Netflix.

Current and Upcoming Exhibitions

2014 has shaped up to be a busy year for showing my art.

I just delivered six paintings to the Redwood Foyer Gallery of the Marin Veterans' Auditorium for an invitational watercolor show that will be up until early June. So if you are attending an event there, be sure to check out the show during intermission.

I've been invited to be part of Marinscapes in late June. This established annual Marin landscape show raises funds for Buckelew Housing. It is always well attended and garners lots of sales. Hopefully with the economy recovering, that will be even more true this year, as it is an excellent cause.

Then in November-December, I will be in a three-person show at Falkirk Cultural Center in San Rafael, titled 'Three Different Views of Water: Paintings by Nelson Hee, Will Noble and Mary Wagstaff.' The gallery is divided into three rooms and each artist will have a room. The reception will be like visiting three artists' studios.

My latest watercolor -- from a dream

Dream by Will Noble/watercolor on paper/ 38" x 24"

I had a dream a few years ago of a golden eagle carrying a tree to barren land. At the time I was so moved by the dream that I created a composite image of it in Photoshop and kept it on my studio wall.
A few months ago I finally felt I wanted to actually paint it.
There are quite a few firsts in this work for me. I have never before painted a bird. (I usually leave that to Barbara Banthien.) I have never used such washes for such large areas as this required. So this was a very different (and much shorter) experience for me.

Carmel Cypress Ink Sketch

Carmel Cypress, ink drawing by Will Noble

I continue to enjoy this period of working in my sketchbook on pieces that take a few days rather than many months. This 9" x 12" ink sketch is of a cypress tree on the California coast around Carmel. -- Will

Completion, acceptance & small works

I recently finished work on the large pencil drawing titled Peggy's Pond, perhaps the most detailed piece I have ever done. The drawing alone took a year. It was just accepted in the Artworks Downtown Drawing show juried by Donna Seager and Suzanne Gray McSweeney of SeagerGray Gallery. The show will be up from May 24 to July 5. Public reception will be June 14, 5 – 8pm. I don't have a photo of this drawing either here on the blog or on my site yet, but I hope you will come to the show to see it!
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Before I get involved in another large project, I am enjoying working in my sketchbook, doing small pencil, ink and watercolor works. Below is one of them, a view from Kehoe Beach in the Point Reyes National Seashore.

With an image size of 9" x 13" I was able to draw and paint it in a number of days, not months. This frees me to transition to other images and experiment with techniques.


Kehoe, a watercolor by Will Noble

Long Beach Museum of Art

On Wednesday I attended the Long Beach Museum of Art opening reception for Influential Element: Exploring the Impact of Water, which for me was the culmination of a very positive experience that any artist can appreciate. My inclusion in this show came to me out of the blue, or so it seemed. I didn’t submit to it. I didn’t know about it. I didn’t, in fact, have to DO anything, except to accept the invitation to have my painting Reflection included in the show, at the request of Megan Ellisor, the co-curator. Of course she would not have found out about me or my paintings if I had not over the years put in a lot of effort into the marketing that anyone who means to make their way in the arts must do – creating a website, submitting to juried shows and galleries, etc, etc. ad nauseum. But even so, it still felt like it came out of the blue, a gift of acknowledgment.

I hand delivered the piece back in November because we happened to be in Southern California visiting our eldest son and his family before taking a flight to San Miguel. I quite honestly had never heard of The Long Beach Museum of Art so I had no idea what to expect. My wife later confessed she had fears that it would be in someone’s garage – almost anything can be called a museum these days. But what a pleasant surprise to find this gem of a small museum! It is located on Ocean Blvd. overlooking the water across a nice stretch of beach. The building is a solid three story structure with two floors of spacious galleries and a lower floor for an arts education program. It has a dedicated parking lot, a lawn area for receptions and another building that houses a museum café. Phew! Meeting Megan and others on the staff, seeing the quality of the work on display, I felt relieved and elated, especially when they told me that my art would be used for the cover of the program shown above!

Flying down just for the day to go to an art opening of a group show seemed a little crazy, but I am so glad we went. Of the eighteen artists represented in the show, seventeen of them attended the reception, many coming from much further than our hour flight down the Coast from San Francisco. It was wonderful to be able to meet so many artists who have the same passion and concern I do for the subject of water. It turns out one of them, whose work I have admired for some time, Eric Zener, lives near us in Marin County, so I hope we will stay in touch.

Among all the really high-quality work displayed, here are a few artists’ whose pieces stood out for me. Matthew Cornell of Orlando, Florida, had two pieces in the show: one a miniature oil on wood titled “Low Country” that is very tightly rendered, Old Masters’ style, and a second, called “Genesis II” a very large canvas of the ocean in reddish tones. Such totally different styles and approaches, but each so well realized!

I looked forward to meeting Elizabeth Patterson after seeing her work “Sunset Highway” done in colored pencil with such photographic detail that I recognized a kindred spirit. She said she is busy preparing for a show in Paris. The thought of working that tight under a deadline makes me a little weak-kneed, and she seemed more than a little stressed, but I’m sure she’ll be up to the task.

Bill Viola is an artist I’ve been aware of since the early 1980’s when I first saw his black and white abstract computer animations at SIGGRAPH technology forums, back when I too was an animator. In this show, his high-speed, hi-def video of a group of people being blasted by water canons (run in super slow motion) titled ‘Tempest,’ was a riveting crowd-pleaser. He told me how great it was to meet all these artists and be able to talk about our work, and I concur. The shared passion we all have for the subject of water and for art made me wish we were all hanging out a bit longer to really explore our shared concern and varied mediums.

Sant Khalsa’s display of 42 gelatin-sliver prints of images she’s taken over the years of water store fronts and signage all over Southern California she says is just a part of an installation that includes Arizona, Nevada and New Mexico. For me one of the most poignant was a sign announcing, ‘Fresh Water Coming Soon!’

It was great to have our son and daughter-in-law there with us, and to have dinner with them afterwards before they deposited us at the airport for our flight home.
If you are in the area, be sure to see the show that’s up through April 3rd.