My name is Alex Noble. I am an Artist who lives and works out of Tokyo Japan.
An Australian, I left in 2000 and lived and travelled throughout Asia, where I worked as an Advertising Art Director. I first began to paint while living in Singapore. Although trained as a Graphic Designer, my painting was completely autodidactic and it has been a bit of journey of self-discovery and more often than not just old fashioned experimentation ever since.
Part of the discovery for me has been the feeling of existing between two worlds creatively. Although I am a Westerner I have lived a good deal of my life in Asia. Creatively this has offered me a lot more than I could have expected if I had stayed at home. Not restricted by my society and it's conventions but also not privy to those of the countries I live in I sit somewhere in-between. So I’m able to repurpose things from a foreign cultures like Japan and rework them to my own designs. I get to take the best from both sides and fuse them together to make something else.
Currently my interest with painting and drawing is a personal reaction to today’s digital age of mass production, where everything is perfect and exact and nothing is unique any-more. I like the idea of making an imperfect mark. I like my art to be “the one-off, never to be repeated” type of art.
Being a commercial Artist has taught me many different creative lessons about time, quality and the expectations of others. So I still embrace modern technology in my work. But see it as only part of a preparation stage in my work.
For the end result, I strive to produce a man-made and man-crafted work of art, for that has greater individual value to people compared to something just churned out from a machine.
When it comes to my subject matter I focus entirely on people. Thanks to my frequent travels I meet a lot of people so the subject matter is kind of endless. Some of them become subject matters for my work but more often than not it’s a combination of different people I meet and the imagination that forms a new person for my work.
I’m not interested in reproducing people realistically. I prefer to focus on a individual part of them, be it a physical feature or a behavioral trait, and then work from that as a starting point and my imagination to fills in the rest. Capturing the innate essence of a person is more important for art, as I believe it is something a camera cannot do. So I guess in closing I can say that my art compresses form, motion and personality into one piece of decorative work of art.
Alex Noble
2011
