Homegrown Inspiration

May 21, 2019

From time to time I’m asked where I find my inspiration. Frankly, I find it almost effortlessly!  Like everyone I guess, I find it easy to put things off until the time is just right.  But it’s amazing how infrequently the stars align and I find myself with brush (or pastel) in hand in front of some beautiful scene at some remote location I’ve been dreaming of visiting for years.

Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s worth planning the trips and making the effort to see the places you dream about.  But I think it’s even more important to keep your eyes open, to stay awake and engaged with the world that’s around you at this very moment!  Maybe it’s all you’ve got at this very moment. And maybe it’s enough.

Sometimes inspiration just sneaks up on you. Like this morning when I stepped out to this view of aspen trees we planted a few feet from our front door.

”You’re my soul and my heart’s inspiration. You’re all I’ve got to get me by.”

~ Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil

Let’s keep in touch, Marshall

Forrest Moses at LewAllen

We all have our heroes and Forrest Moses has long been one of mine. I’ve been ceaselessly inspired by what he calls “an expressionistic response to a figurative subject.”

It was a joy to spend the morning studying the 50 Year Survey Exhibition of his paintings and monotypes at LewAllen Galleries in Santa Fe.

It’s an outstanding show. I hope some of Forrest’s paint handling rubs off on me! We’ll see!

Let’s keep in touch,

Marshall

You Just Can’t Have Too Many Trees!

When thinking about how easy it is for me to find inspiration to paint, I would be remiss in not saying that I’m very grateful to live in a stunningly beautiful (inspiring) corner of the world.  As you can see from the view from our deck we are smack dab in the middle of a mature ponderosa pine and douglas fir ecosystem.  In our years there we’ve added to the arboreal diversity by planting literally hundreds of aspen trees.  Aspens, imagine that!  A boy’s got to have something to paint, right?

“Smack dab in the middle
So I can rock and roll to satisfy my soul.”

~ Ray Charles

Let’s keep in touch,
Marshall

What Was the Question?

April 30, 2019

One question that all artists struggle with from time to time is how to keep those juices flowing. My answer is to go to the most direct and simple art making approach in my arsenal. For me that’s pastel on paper. 

Okay guys, here’s one for the techies – Sennelier and Unison soft pastel on Somerset Velvet Black printmaking paper. I’ve tried dozens of papers and pastels and this combination works every time for me. Will it work for you? Well, only you can answer that question.

If I don’t have a painting in mind on a given morning, I’ll grab a few pastels and a bunch of paper and knock out sketches until the light bulb switches on! It may be the subject matter, the line of the horizon, or an intriguing color relationship, but at some point in my sketching practice the light bulb WILL switch on. It always has. So far.

Go have fun!

Let’s keep in touch,

Marshall Noice

Shade of Pale

April 23, 2019

For a while now I’ve been aware that my color preferences change with the seasons.  Really!  Grey, winter weather brings out warm colors.  Lots of reds, yellows, and oranges show up on my canvasses during ski season.  As the weather warms and the sailboat goes in the lake, I invariably shift to a cooler palette.  I wonder if I’m painting half warm and half cool paintings at the time of the equinox?  I’ll get back to you on that. 

At one point I tried to figure out why the shift occurred. And after some considerable analyzing and soul searching I came up with my answer: the shift occurred because it did. There is no reason. I’ve come to accept the fact that I don’t need to know why.

“Morning Ridgetop” is definitely a height of summer painting for me.  It seems a little early in the season for such a pale, cool painting to come to life, but there it is.  It happened!  And I don’t need to know why.  And the boat isn’t even in the lake yet!

“She said, “there is no reason”

And the truth is plain to see.”

– Procol Harum

Let’s keep in touch,

Marshall

A Day In the Life

April 16, 2019

View of our east pasture, inspiration for “Ancient Juniper.” The subject is a venerable old bush in the east pasture of our Lone Pine home. It sneaks into my consciousness and onto my canvas with some frequency! I painted this from memory.

This is the painting after the first couple work sessions.  My typical painting practice is to work in warm colors one day, let it dry, then work in cool colors the next day.

Here’s the finished painting.  I spend as much time as it takes to get the piece to resonate with a sense of place for me.  That is critical. Sometimes the changes are small, sometimes not so small! Sometimes it happens in a few days.  More often it takes a few weeks. And infrequently there are those problematic paintings that I just can’t give up on but end up working on for years. Truly. The changes are always essential.  Unless they are not essential.  That, friends, is the question!

Let’s keep in touch,

Marshall

Marc Rothko’s Secret

April 9, 2019

A while back I mentioned that translucent oil colors are an essential part of my painting technique.  Here’s the scoop!  All oil paints are more or less translucent or opaque.  

In the earliest days of art making oil paints were made of ground up rocks and nuts and berries and bugs and other colorful materials, that when mixed with some kind of vechile, made paint.  Some oil colors are still made exactly this way.

The difference that I’m interested in is whether paint lets light go through – is more translucent, or stops all light – more opaque.

In the early stages of my work I use only translucent colors. I like the effects I get when I put one translucent color on top of another.  It gives the painting the color complexity and visual tension or harmony, depending on the combination of colors,  I strive for in my work.  Toward the end of the painting process I often turn to opaque colors to add a heavier impasto and create further complexity.  That thick – thin contrast is also something I strive for in my painting.  But that’s another subject.

Gamblin Perylene Red

Can you imagine a Rothko painting without the magic of layer upon layer of translucent colors?  Without translucency Rothko’s work would not exist!

FYI: Gamblin Perylene Red is hands down my all time favorite translucent red oil color.

Let’s keep in touch,

Marshall Noice

In Case You Were Wondering About Lapis Lazuli

April 2, 2019

If you, like me, are fascinated by color, I have the book for you.  Author Victoria Finlay’s “Color, A Natural History of the Palette” is a richly detailed, elegantly written, illuminating story of (to quote the chapter names) ochre, black and brown, white, red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet.  The book is part art history, part travelogue, part science lesson, and thoroughly entertaining.  This is no dry treatise on the source of pigments.  Rather it is a delightfully engaging rainbow of stories about our old pal color!

Artist blog Marshall Noice Contemporary Art

If you’ve ever wondered where the carmine red in Cherry Coke and lipstick comes from, read on.  You’ll never look at a box of Crayolas the same way again.

Oh by the way, the color in carmine red comes from the blood of insects! 

Let’s keep in touch,

Marshall  

Shake it up!

March 26, 2019

A few weeks ago I mentioned I was heading into the studio to experiment with a more limited color palette. I thought I’d show you the results of that experimentation.

Contemporary landscape of blue, purple, turquoise trees along a river
Shadows on the Taylor Fork
Oil on Canvas, 60×40

The painting “Shadows on the Taylor Fork” uses five colors that are adjacent to each other on the color wheel, yellow-green, green, blue-green, blue, and blue-violet.  OK, truth be told, a little bit of blue’s complementary color found it’s way into the painting. How did that orange sneak in there?  But for the most part the painting succeeds on the strength of analogous color harmony. 

When using a limited color scheme it’s the modulation of value, lightness and darkness, of each color that keeps the composition engaging.  My eye keeps moving throughout the painting and slams to a stop when it hits the orange.  That’s what creates the visual tension I want in my work.

Always trying to keep things a little off balance guys. Let’s not get TOO comfortable!

Let’s keep in touch,

Marshall  

Robert Rauschenberg at LACMA

March 19, 2019

We had an amazing visit to Los Angeles County Museum of Art.  LACMA has the largest art collection in the West. 

I was especially interested in viewing Rauschenberg’s monumental “The 1/4 Mile”.  The piece was seventeen years in the making.  The 190 panels are, you guessed it, a quarter mile in length. 

Completed in 1998 it exemplifies his use of varied mediums and methods, and his lifelong artist practice of experimentation. 

What was that I was saying in my blog a few weeks back about the importance of scale?

Let’s keep in touch,

Marshall