Paul Noble a Turner Prize Nominee

What a pleasant surprise to see Paul Noble (b.1963) as a nominee for the Turner Prize 2012.  It is no surprise that the Turner Prize has continued to be controversial this year with the nominees having limited relationships with painting.  For a prize that started as a national (painting) prize named in honour of the countries beloved landscape painter J.W.M Turner it has taken a dramatic turn in the last decade.  As a positive, one could say that the prize has ensured that it is a contemporary competition that reflects the trends in contemporary art in Britain, rather than specifically being associated with painting.  However, there are those that are wondering where all the painting has gone?  Paul Noble is notable for his focus on drawing.  His large scale drawings based on his fictious town of 'Nobson Newtown' are insanely detailed and, although large in scale, focus on the minutaie that we are more used to seeing from historic Northern Renaissance figures like Hieronymous Bosch and Bruegel.

  
  Paul Noble, detail of drawing.                                       



Bruegel (the Elder), Tower of Babel, 1563.


With pencil drawing as his main source of media (complemented by sculptures in the Turner Prize exhibition) Noble acknowledges that his inspiration was about going back to basics and reinvestigating the doodles and naivity of his drawing habits while at secondary school.  But there is also inspiration that has come from working with computers as recalled in a previous article:

"Nobson Newtown itself emerged a few years later, when Noble was playing with an ancient computer program for creating graphic fonts. His alphabet of letters in this new font was presented as a “keymap” on the screen, providing the eureka moment of the Nobson project — he saw the letters as buildings in a landscape. “The fact that it was called a map and that I was making these letter shapes that were blocky and architectural meant that I leapt into this pictorial, geographical space,” he says. “So I made an actual map, and everything that is on that little map is what I am now working through.”" (as read online at http://www.standard.co.uk/arts/visual-arts/turner-prize-2012-its-back-to-the-drawing-board-for-paul-noble-8193847.html)

Who knows what will happen when the results come out in December but after many years of hard work and intensive drawing Noble is now part of a historical group of Turner Prize who has a strong career ahead of him.