With the thought that artists travel to distant shores to gain vitality and colour in their work, Do Noble has come from that distant shore, the Philippines, and has already found his own extraordinary animated colour. Noble likens his strength of colour to an artist he admires, Paul Gauguin as a seeker of life in exciting colour.
Noble, in giving another descriptive definition of his technique used the word ‘pointilism’ and called to mind neo-impressionist Seurat’s tiny dots of colour, where Seurat using the ‘building blocks’ of impressionism and seeking the optical illusion of an atmosphere that moves, required the viewer’s eye to mix the colours at a distance.
Noble said that the form in his paintings can be read at a distance or up close. His methodic strokes give a somewhat dappled appearance – ‘dappled to variegate with spots’, but at such variegation and such spots, with enough light shining through to make Renoir smile.
In musical terms, if pointilism’s dots can be as the tinkling of bells, then Noble’s dabs perhaps can be said to be the vibrating clash of symbals.
Do Noble’s tapestry of life paintings are subjects on the beauty of life passionately sought out and captured initially by his own photography and then painstakingly painted in his rhythmic systematic style, in oil, oil pastel, watercolour, pen and ink and pencil.
If some paintings ‘smile’, then Noble’s work ‘laughs’, both in subject and his intriguing use of colour and application.
In his colour perspective, Noble said that sometimes he uses his strongest colour in the far distance and for the most important focal point, with cool colours for the foreground. “Although”, he adds with an amused knowing smile, “I really don’t limit myself as to where i used my strong colours!” Noble has given the colour wheel a spin and it seems that artists’ familiar colour perspectives of cool colours receding and warm colours bringing the subject foreward, are not his only thoughts. Noble has discovered an innovative ground when using his oil pastelbars and works on a black, brown, green, red and yellow large emery cloth, saying that it gives different effects and some bite to the texture.
Do Noble graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the Feati University in Manila. His face lights up as he tells how fortunate he considers himself to be to have been under the guidance of Professor Ibarra de la Rosa. It seems that this art master, whose own energetic exploration of his subjects, resulting in the professor painting the same subject again and again from total realism right through to complete abstraction, inspired Noble to achieve his fearless use of colour and inventive technique.
