Santa Fe, NM
Ventana Fine Art, July 5-17
Marshall Noice, Hyde Park Pathway, oil, 60 x 48.
This story was featured in the July 2019 issue of Southwest Art magazine. Get the Southwest Art July 2019 print issue or digital download now–then subscribe to Southwest Art and never miss another story.
MARSHALL Noice has long looked to the thriving ecosystem around his home in northwestern Montana’s alpine country for inspiration. Now the expressionistic landscape painter has bottled up the beauty and vitality of his forested homeland in a new body of work that includes a number of large-scale oil paintings and around 20 small pastel sketches. The solo exhibition, entitled Nature in Soft Focus, opens at Ventana Fine Art in Santa Fe, NM, with an artist’s reception on Friday, July 5, at 5 p.m.
Showstoppers by their sheer size alone are several oil paintings that measure 9 by 5 feet—some of the largest works he’s ever completed, says Noice. Such impressive pieces might initially overshadow the artist’s pastel sketches, but visitors would be remiss not to take a close look at these preliminary studies, where the seeds of inspiration begin en plein air, allowing Noice to soak up and store away the energy of each place he portrays. Back in his studio, says gallery sales manager Wolfgang Mabry, “Marshall wants to be able to smell the rain and hear the wind when he’s painting, and he knows he’s on the right track when those senses get awakened.”
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- Marshall Noice, Ancient Junipers, oil, 36 x 36.
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- Marshall Noice, West Pasture, oil, 60 x 48.
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- Marshall Noice, Beneath a Yellow Ridge, oil, 36 x 36.
Color is an especially vital ingredient in the artist’s paintings. By placing discordant colors together, Noice seeks to create “tension-filled vibration” on his canvases, even with the low-chroma palette he’s exploring in about half of his latest pieces. “I’m interested in color relationships that are still very tension-filled, but I’ve used colors that are less vivid than the bright colors people associate with my work,” he says. Since studying a series of “highly deconstructivist” landscape paintings by artist Richard Diebenkorn (1922-1993), Noice has also introduced some hard edges into his work. “It dips my toe more deeply into the pond of deconstructivism,” he says. “I think my flirtation with it is adding an edginess to my work that didn’t exist before.”
Though Noice doesn’t abstract his subject matter entirely, it’s the painterly aspects of his work that he hopes viewers ultimately respond to—the contrasts between thick and thin paint, warm and cool colors, light against darks, soft and hard edges. “I want to go out, find a scene I find thrilling, and move from the experience of viewing that scene to creating a nonliteral painting that’s filled with that sense of place,” he says. —Kim Agricola
contact information
505.983.8815
www.ventanafineart.com
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- Marshall Noice, Old Growth, Lawrence Park, oil, 48 x 24.
This story was featured in the July 2019 issue of Southwest Art magazine. Get the Southwest Art July 2019 print issue or digital download now–then subscribe to Southwest Art and never miss another story.
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