Jean Noble: Turning Seasons

19 Apr 2006 in Highland, Visual Arts & Crafts

Tore Art Gallery, until late May 2006

'Glenbanchor Blizzard' by Jean Noble.

THE PERFORMANCE OF a piece of music based on the old Celtic tree calendar inspired Newtonmore-based artist Jean Noble to begin her ‘Cycle of the Trees of Life’ series.

This group of eighteen intricate oil paintings represent each of the thirteen lunar months in the old Celtic calendar, traditionally associated with a particular tree. Paintings representing the summer and winter solstice and spring and autumn equinoxes are also part of the series, which links nature’s cycles of renewal and decay to the human life cycle from conception to death.

Each work is the result of a complex approach to both design and subject. as her accompanying booklet ‘Where do my ideas come from? An insight into an artist’s thought process’ testifies. Noble’s passion for symbolism, mythology, Celtic art and biology are intricately woven into her paintings.

This is a difficult series to display as the artist conceived it. It requires a large space and ideally that the suite be read in a continuous sequence to fully appreciate the link the artist makes between subject, tone and composition.
As her original sketched design shows, the paintings progress visually in a tonal cycle from darkness to light to darkness again. In this way they mimic the light characteristic of each season from dark toward the brightest central point of the summer solstice and then receding again like the turn of the seasons to winter.

In times past the audience for a spiritual work would have understood its symbolic meaning as easily as narrative

The human cycles in the series are also composed in a kind of architectural arc, which begins at conception, reaches its highest point at maturation and then “stoop[s] towards old age”. Human representation and portrait faces are placed on each panel to mirror the creation of life and its decline.

Presented in any way other than in a long sequence or in a large circular room this whole design is impossible to fully appreciate. Each piece alludes to it but without the benefit of the artist’s notes we don’t actually see the architecture within her design.

Noble’s strengths are her sensitive handling of tonality, design and delicate handling of paint, and these are used to great effect in a work like ‘Spring Gorse’. Here the woody texture of a Goddess in shallow relief is at the heart of the painting surrounded by concentric circles, the activity of bees and the tangle of earthy gorse roots beneath. It is an emblematic design, symbolic of a particular stage of our natural cycle painted with care and devotional in nature.

‘Turn Around’ and its depiction of the autumn equinox uses the aspen, its leaves falling into gold as the wheel of the year turns yet again. It contains a lovely gradation of colour which seems to suggest the gentle movement of leaves being shed and spiralling back to the earth.

‘Rhythm of Life’ heralds the summer and uses a microscopic examination of the heather flower as its link with divinity. The smallest detail is raised to the status of the sky and occupies the same space as the goddess figure. The distant hills of purple form the base of the painting and the idea that each minute detail in creation is linked to the whole makes Noble’s focus deeply spiritual.

Other works in the series are less convincing, especially those which use the human face. As portraiture they seem clumsy and at odds with the strength of the overall design. Perhaps this is because although central to the composition they are not central to spiritual ideas which are conveyed much more convincingly in this series as symbol.

For me personally realism seems an odd bedfellow with such ancient and basic belief systems (and by basic I do not mean simple). It is rather like visually mixing the Christian godliness in each minute blade of grass revered by Ruskin and mixing it with the earthy abstraction and fecundity of a stone goddess of the Celts. As an aesthetic I am not entirely convinced that it works.

Although first and foremost these paintings are visual works, the artist’s booklet ensures that we are aware of the ideas, symbol and myth in each one of them. In times past the audience for a spiritual work would have understood its symbolic meaning as easily as narrative. Stories and mythology were intrinsically connected with everyday human life, we were far more connected with a seasonal existence to the land.

Her writing gives a fascinating insight into the artist’s design, methodology and spiritual beliefs, but paintings are ultimately and immediately visual. What Noble’s booklet does illuminate is that in the modern world we seem to have lost our grasp of the true meaning of mythology. As she points out in her writing about the series today we regard “myth” as falsehood.

The real strength in this work is perhaps that for this particular artist mythology and spiritual belief are as powerful and potent today as ever.

Also on display are a large series of small landscapes which exhibit Noble’s characteristically gentle gradations of tone and colour.

Of these three are particularly evocative; “Glenbanchor Blizzard I and II” and “Softly, softly” whose muted colours and gentle textures are like the hush of fallen snow that absorbs all sound.

Fertile with ideas “Turning Seasons” is a gentle and devotional study of cycles of nature and the human life cycle.