There is a symphonic quality to Scott Noel’s paintings, and not only those with a tangle of figures tumbling in gravity-less slow motion through the vast expanses of his canvases.
Noel, a prolific painter who began teaching and exhibiting in Philadelphia in 1980 and has since mounted over 30 solo exhibitions at galleries, universities and museums, traces his intrigue with this sense of weightlessness back to his early attraction to comic book superheroes flying above the urban landscape. Later he found the same longing in Rubens, Tiepolo and Edwin Dickinson. But, he says, “The gravity-less feeling is only convincing when everything else in the picture as well as the logic of the body corresponds to our sense of normative space and gravity.”
Terrace St. Playground, 2022, oil on linen, 97 x 138"
Noel demonstrates his mastery of striking that balance in his latest body of work, which is the subject of an April show in his home city at Gross McCleaf Gallery, for which he revisited another early passion—basketball.
In the exhibition catalog he penned himself, Noel, a philosophical academic whose way with words is as keen as his abilities as a visual storyteller, writes about the sport’s allure and the jazz-like rhythm of the playground. “The movements of basketball can be beautiful and, at times, cathartic. Spins and crossovers are dance-like steps. The wit of no-look passes and the calculation of the deflection on a long lead to a cutter are master classes in the laws of motion. Defending against an opponent, sliding, pushing, changing direction, and, finally, attempting to stop a shot by timing a jump to deflect or block the ball’s flight generated a kind of pas-de-deux between the players. Propelling oneself into the air to shoot, defend or rebound in concert with other bodies was the pinnacle, a combat of angels.”
Parker St. Shootaround, Hippmenes and Atlanta, 2023, oil on linen, 80 x 162”
For reasons unknown, Noel found the basketball meleé erotically charged, and soon drew comparisons between what he saw and felt on the court, and the religious iconography showing up in his drawings at the time.
“A figure jumping with both arms overhead and a figure suspended from a cross have basically the same bodily disposition in a moment that makes flight and falling interchangeable,” he writes. “It wasn’t clear what my youthful watercolors of crucifixions, jazz musicians and basketball players foretold of the future. What is true, I think, is that every artist’s beginnings are mostly banal until they encounter some creative yeast to transform personal eccentricity into demanding aspiration. The yeast that overtook my taste for religious imagery, basketball, and black popular culture was the work of Michelangelo, Titian, Rubens, and Velazquez found in art books.”
Portrait of Emily, 2024, oil on linen, 48 x 42”
In the late ’70s, Noel returned to his early passions and applied the style of artists like Degas and great American figurative painter Lennart Anderson (1928-2015) to what, in clumsy hands or through imperceptive eyes, might have remained banal.
“Since childhood I’ve loved picturing people—their likenesses and their figures,” says Noel. “I couldn’t say why, except for an abiding fascination. One thing I am aware of is that the drive to see specific people clearly—the figures in my pictures are individuals who model for me—is always bound up with my fascination with the way people have been seen in earlier pictures, whether Fayum portraits, the court portraits of Velázquez or the bourgeois of Degas.”
He continues, “It’s been said, ‘we spend our lives learning what we knew in the first place.’ The meeting in my youthful imagination of playground basketball and my love of Baroque figure compositions was a preview of something I needed to articulate for my working life. I’ve been able to furnish this visual space with a lot of covert thematic interest, especially my love of mythic archetypes and the never-ending comedy in the contest between men and women.” Noel’s latest works include examples of the myriad subject matter that has always compelled him to paint—interiors, portraits, still lifes, urban landscapes and his enduring fixation on the nude figure. At this point in his career, Noel is taking more risks, allowing the genres to overlap and more imagination to intermingle with the strictly observed.
Emily Visits the Studio, 2023, oil on linen, 56 x 80”
“I’ve been making pictures seriously for 50 years,” says Noel. “I think I’m getting better at singing the things I used only to be able to say. As I get older I give more and more of pictures away, anxious they find a home in another’s imagination. I also have an intimation of how little art has to do with personality. Great art functions primarily as a kind of mirror, evermore polished, where viewers find themselves and an enlarging reflection of the world. I think one of the hopes of an artist might be to completely disappear in this endless mirroring between the viewer and the world.”
Memories of Earl Monroe and Bobby Jones, 2012-23, oil on linen, 96 x 168”
Noel hires models to pose for him in his studio or at school and goes onsite to sketch “the set” upon which he will stage his scene. Having taught himself to draw and paint briskly, he is able to create a near life-size figure in several hours, which accumulate into what he calls “rehearsals” that can then be arranged as an ensemble on a large array of canvases. The models then return to the studio and he paints them and the space they will inhabit together on the canvas, “each figure realized—usually—in a fresco painter’s giornata,” he explains. “In this sense, everything I do is from life. I don’t use photographs. The connective tissue for the pictures comes from a personal feeling about scale, shape articulation and color. Although my pictures look realistic, I don’t think any other temperament or technology would produce them. They are ‘sight specific’.”
Noel’s output is entirely unique and specific to him but he believes a work of art must also “transform the eccentrically personal into a sharable eloquence.”
Blue Shelves with Self Portrait, 2022, oil on linen, 50 x 47"
“The ‘eccentrically personal’ is all the stuff we just like as we individuate,” he explains. “This might be as random as Jack Kirby’s Silver Surfer, The Doors’ ‘The End’, Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus with, perhaps, a dash of Bernie Fuchs’s golf illustrations for Sports Illustrated in 1974. These tastes, by themselves, don’t mean much, but if I can route the feelings they awakened into a rigorous form language like that of Titian or Lucian Freud, I might persuade myself I had made something that could survive my contingent span and encourage another poem in response.
“I see painting and picturing as access to an ‘eternal present’ where the world comes into being and I get to feel in conversation with all the poets across time who have affirmed this world,” he continues. “Painting also reminds us our experiences are both personal and coextensive with the experiences of nameless others across time. This coextensiveness, this intuitive recognition of shared truth through art, interests me greatly.”
Dasha and Keira, 2023, oil on linen, 62 x 74"
Pondering his relationship to the beautiful young people he paints, Noel references an essay by Simone Weil called “Implicit Forms of the Love of God,” in which the French philosopher and mystic proposes that this ideal of love dictates seeing and embracing the beauty of the world exactly as it is. “She also offers a speculative proposal, strange and hard to dismiss, that all vice, maybe all evil, originates in the human compulsion to ‘eat beauty’. “I need [my models’] collaboration in the project of art as much as I need the sunlight in a garden painting or a harvest of fruit for a still life,” he says. “The young get to play with the ways they’re perceived moving freely from god-like archetypes of youth and beauty to the assertion of a unique and resistant individual consciousness, anxious to be seen, but only with their consent.
Studio Panorama, Auditioning for Adam and Eve, 2022, oil on linen, 80 x 180"
“The key for the painter is to pay attention and stay open to whatever energy appears. That energy, sacred to the gods, is the exclusive property of the apples of perception, people, objects, places, whatever ripens before the eye, not to be eaten, only seen. Painting might be a transgression within the sacred grove, but I hope not.” —
The Apples of Pomona
April 4-27, 2024
Gross McCleaf Gallery, 127 S. 16th Street, Philadelphia, PA 19102
(215) 665-8138, www.grossmccleaf.com
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