Lisa Noble is a Virginia-based artist whose work delves into themes of identity, memory, and personal history.
She began her formal artistic training at the Alberta College of Art & Design in 1997, and completed her BFA at the Corcoran College of Art & Design in Washington, D.C., graduating magna cum laude in 2001. Throughout her studies, she received both the Corcoran Scholarship and the Dean’s Merit Scholarship.
Her work has been featured in exhibitions across the U.S., including The Painting Center and Katonah Museum of Art in New York, and the Taubman Museum of Art in Virginia. Noble is an Affiliate Member of the First Street Gallery in New York and is included in the White Columns Curated Artist Online Registry.
In 2020, she received the Wherewithal Recovery Grant from the Washington Project for The Arts and the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.
StatementI paint to learn. My process hinges on exploration and the resulting development of my skills and understanding of materials.
In my current work, I start by sketching with graphite or ink on big pads of newsprint, thinking largely about a certain feeling or inclination that has been brewing inside me. I allow my lines to guide me, not thinking about the aesthetics of their placement. After several iterations, I move to canvas and begin by echoing the most pleasing aspects of the preliminary sketches, with the aim to find early balance and harmony.
I usually work in a single session if time allows because paint behaves differently on the first day than any other day, and I prefer those first results. So, I try to work quickly, which also frees me from thinking too much about what I will do next.
I consider the areas where lines intersect and what negative or positive interplays these could create. I like to establish a visual foundation of rhythm, push, and pull. Then I can bring in different colors of varying viscosity, from thick impasto to highly fluid, transparent, and dripping. I like to scrub, stroke, smooth out the paint, and draw with it. I like the undrawn line that a screwdriver or bamboo skewer make. The reductive process of Sgraffito brings a patterned, decorative, and gendered sensibility to my compositions.
Ultimately each work is a physical record of my experimentation—a visual documentation of the choices and risks that lead from one discovery to the next decision as I learn from one painting to the next.
Cvhttps://lisanoble.com/artist-c...
StateVA
CountryUSA
