Image: Clarendon Fine Art, Westport
Clarendon Fine Art has taken on the American painter Adam Collier Noel, introducing him as its newest artist in its September newsletter. The gallery, part of the DeMontfort Fine Art group, now lists a group of his original, framed paintings on its website.
Noel works in abstraction, building his canvases around colour, texture and geometric structure. According to the biography published by the gallery, he paints from a studio in the mountains of Blue Ridge, Georgia, and aims for compositions that register as both energetic and meditative.
His route to painting ran through photography. Born in Indianapolis, he studied photography at the Herron School of Art and Design at Indiana University, graduating with a Bachelor of Fine Art, and went on to work as a professional photographer. The gallery credits that period with shaping his grasp of composition, light and colour, before the more immediate, physical process of painting drew him away from the camera. A later move to South Florida, where he worked for a major art gallery, gave him first-hand experience of the art trade and of collecting; it was there, by the gallery's account, that his colour-led style began to take shape.
The gallery lists Colour Field painting among his influences, citing Josef Albers and Frank Stella, and describes his interest in how neighbouring colours alter the way each one is perceived. He works in acrylic, laying down successive layers with a palette knife – a process he likens to sculpting the paint rather than simply applying it – so that sharply defined geometric passages sit alongside rougher, uneven areas of surface. Although the finished compositions are tightly organised, the method is described as intuitive: each colour is chosen in response to the one before, and the surface is built up, partly covered and reworked until the picture reaches a balance.
Noel's paintings have been shown at events in the United States including Miami Art Week, the Hamptons Fine Art Fair and the Scottsdale Ferrari Art Fair. The gallery states that his work is held in private collections in the US, Europe, South America and Australia.
Clarendon frames his practice around the emotional charge of colour, presenting the paintings as works meant to be looked at slowly, with attention to the interplay of hue, texture and rhythm and to the visible traces of how they were made.
