"Since coming to Philadelphia, I've found subject matter in the city's neighborhoods. In 2004, I began painting intensively from views offered by the Hamilton Building (of The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts), and then within classrooms and the museum cast hall itself."
The Porch at 252 Pensdale, 38" x 54", Oil On Linen
"All the while, students, models and friends entered these paintings as actors in domestic dramas and mythic pageants. People appear in my pictures as specific likeness and I'm not sure whether to describe myself as a figure painter, a portraitist, a cityscape painter or a creator of visual narratives."
- Scott Noel
Jan's Garden in July, 68" x 64", Oil on canvas
Scott Noel began teaching and exhibiting in Philadelphia in 1980, after completing undergraduate study at Washington University in Saint Louis in 1978. Since that time he has mounted over 30 solo exhibitions at galleries, universities and museums as well as many group shows. Solo shows have appeared at the State Museum in Harrisburg, the University of Virginia, the Bowery Gallery, the Painting Center and fifteen exhibitions at the More Gallery, Mangel Art Gallery and Gross McCleaf Gallery in Philadelphia.
Noel has curated exhibitions for museums, including The Evidence of the Senses at the Woodmere Art Museum in 1990 and Imaginative Affinities: Echoes of Edwin Dickinson in Contemporary American Painting at PAFA in 2002. He has also written catalog essays for peers and forbears, including Lennart Anderson, Larry Day, Rose Naftulin and Sangram Majumdar. Noel's paintings are included in numerous private, public and corporate collections. He has received grants from the Bader Foundation, the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts and the Independence Foundation as well as a fellowship to the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris. His work has been reviewed in Arts and Art in America and he has twice been profiled in American Artist.
Noel teaches figure drawing and painting in the Certificate/BFA and MFA programs and is a critic in the MFA program. (Courtesy of www.pafa.org)
Britomart, 84" x 78", Oil On Linen
Scott Noel in his studio pictured in front of Persephone’s Departure.
(Courtesy Josiah King)
A DURABLY BEAUTIFUL WORLD: THE PROCESS AND VISION OF SCOTT NOEL
By Josiah King
2018
Upon arrival at Scott Noel’s studio space at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia, I was struck by the abundance of richly painted, large-scale canvases leaning against the walls. Noel, who has been working in Philadelphia since 1978, is a prolific painter of the still-life, figure, and landscape. The artist engages in the making of images through observing his subjects directly. Many of his paintings consist of constructed narratives, in which figures are engaged in roles reminiscent of ancient mythologies. I spoke with Noel about his process and mode of thinking as he was preparing for the opening of Philadelphia, a show of his work at Gross McCleaf Gallery in April, 2016.
Ben And Patrice In August, 82" x 52", Oil On Canvas
by Ephraim Rubenstein
In Scott Noel's Studying the Studio, the artist's workspace opens up before you, filled with light and air. As your eye strolls around, you sense every foot of available space in the studio. You feel how, as you enter, you must be careful to avoid the space heater and to walk around the table arranged with pots. Once inside the studio, you might move over to the right wall to examine a painting that has caught your eye, before you settle finally into the armcharis in the corner. While resting comfortably in the chair, you can stare out into the expansive cityscape, a reminder that space coninues to unfold infinitely beyond the studio's windows and that it is deeply pleasurable to have it more intimately contained in the artist's studio.
While some artists confine themselves to working in one or two genres, Noel paints in every conceivable form - interior, cityscape, still life, figure, portraiture, and narrative painting. Noel's eye is voracious, his aesthetic ambition high. If one of his life's projects has been to paint in all of these genres, another has been to combine them in such unexpected ways as to baffle the viewer's basic preconceptions about these categories. And the place that he uses as the visual staging ground for these uncanny admixtures is the studio.
“Painting beautiful people and things in beautiful light, indeed finding almost every moment of perception a candidate for this beauty, I wonder if a certain fidelity to the ever-renewed ripening of an orchard through all its necessary stages of metamorphosis isn’t an analogy for the privilege of painting.”
- Scott Noel, The Apples of Pomona, 2024 catalog
Gross McCleaf Gallery is pleased to present Apples of Pomona, an exhibition of new works by Scott Noel showcasing a vibrant array of new oil paintings and several acrylic and pastel works on rag board. Each painting is alive with Noel’s spirited intention to, “vary and reconfigure painting’s visual eloquence to express the beauty of the world”. While the small to medium-sized paintings range in subject from the nude to still-life and landscape, the exhibition is anchored by three monumental, multi-panel figure compositions that demonstrate Noel’s devotion to layered narratives, sophisticated color mixing and his signature painterly touch.
“I believe artists must make space for pleasure in painting, both in the act of painting and in the pleasure of viewing it.”
-Lauren Whearty
In her first solo exhibition with Gross McCleaf Gallery, titled Painter’s Table, Lauren Whearty celebrates cheerful color and playful patterns in a contemporary take on the artistic tradition of still life painting. With a keen eye for possibilities within this genre, Whearty embraces a feminist perspective, using everyday objects as building blocks to create her own distinctive universe. Each item she incorporates becomes a referential exploration of art history and the process of image creation, adding depth and meaning to her work.
“I think everything is in there: events, people I know, stories, architecture, music…I’m a big believer in coincidence, synchronicity, and numerology: it’s all about how things get funneled and filtered into a linear, transcendent expression.”
-Thomas Paul Raggio
Gross McCleaf is pleased to exhibit a new body of hard-edged abstractions by Thomas Paul Raggio in his first solo show with the gallery. This exhibition, titled In the Valley, features Raggio’s signature combination of carefully organized lines and stripes, meticulously painted in acrylic. While non-objective, the painted bars create harmonious color vibrations that ripple across each canvas. Crisscrossing diagonals offer geometry, movement, and balance...
“I love to paint in the presence of a sitter or in the light of a cityscape, but I can’t “capture” the appearance; rather, I move the paint around, simplify, blur, scrape, and rephrase until the beloved seems to appear…. The vocation of art begins in a longing that only the art can address. At first, the longing attaches to something in the world. But, over time, the artist notices something about how picturing itself causes almost anything seen to open as an occasion for wonder and surprise.”
- Scott Noel
In his eleventh solo exhibition at Gross McCleaf, Scott Noel presents an impressive selection of monumental, narrative paintings...
Gross McCleaf Gallery is pleased to announce two solo exhibitions of new paintings by gallery artists, Natasha Das and Max Mason and a collection of mini exhibitions, featuring the work of Giovanni Casadei, Rhea Cutillo, Ying Li, Scott Noel, Thomas Paquette, Jeffrey Reed and Val Rossman.
Textures created with thread are to Natasha Das what brushstrokes are for other artists: fundamental, visceral, expressive elements. Das’ labor-intensive compositions convey her unique voice by representing an engagement with both abstraction and the weaving tradition of her native India, lending an autobiographical component to her work. . .
Scott Noel’s exhibition “The Academy and the Alcázar,” at Gross McCleaf Gallery, is more ambitious than previous shows of his I’ve seen — he’s been given both the front and back galleries — and his paintings have a new lushness.
His compositions of figures are still studied, but they’re more painterly.
Noel’s characteristic filtered natural light makes people and places seem exceptionally still and quiet. I’m reminded of hot, dry air at noon in a city more Mexico City than humid Philadelphia. And that’s still very much intact.
Noel observed paintings by Velásquez at the Prado in Madrid and felt a kinship with the 17th-century Spanish painter, spurring this latest body of work.
