Exhibition News from Noel Myles

Regular readers of this blog will know that I’m a big fan of the joiner pictures of Noel Myles. I really recommend seeing his work when exhibited, because his images are generally quite large, and work well when seen large. Web pages and computer projects just don’t show the size and clarity of his work. Noel currently has a piece called Earth that is on show at the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts. Made up from 288 individual 12” x 8” prints, it is, as you can see, huge, measuring 2.75 x 6.53 m. He reports having very sore thumbs after pushing in over a thousand pins to mount the PVC reinforced prints. The installation will be on view until Easter at least, but due to alterations at the SCVA, it is worth checking in advance.

Earth © Noel Myles

If Noel’s Still Films images can be considered as a form of photographic cubism, then this work is a close parallel to the colour field (!) work of Mark Rothko. The hue of the ploughed fields is as found; the typically rich red soil from the around Hereford and the light hues from East Anglia. To quote Noel: ‘I took the photos one winter in Suffolk, Essex and Herefordshire. I knew I wanted the red soil that's there. The bluish tinge is frost. I was using the different colours in a similar way to an artist using paint; the overall colour of the piece emerging with the placement of one colour next to another. After this series I moved from film to digital. Changing rolls with numb fingers and dropping them was too much for me.’ 

As with his other joiner pictures, you can spend much longer looking at these large composites than you can with individual photographs. The eye scans and rescans the image, picking up similar, but often different, detail with each glance. Because we are familiar with photographs and largely believe them to be an accurate document, we read them very quickly. With paintings and other manually crafted images, we take longer to explore and decode them. The experience of viewing Noel’s abstract expressionist composites is much closer to viewing a painting than a photograph, and one of the reasons they are so rewarding to see on the wall.

Following on from his successful exhibition at Cambridge University Noel Myles will shortly have the opening to a new exhibition at the Minories Gallery in Colchester. This is a joint exhibition with James Maturin-Baird called Between Photography and runs between March 16th and May 11th. Noel tells me that he will be showing a fair amount of new work which I’m looking forward to seeing.

Looking at Still Films

In Mexico © Noel Myles

I spent a very enjoyable evening last Thursday at the PV of Noel Myles' new exhibition Paradise which has just opened at the Alison Richards Building on the Sedgwick site of Cambridge University. As ever, it was worth the trip to see Noel’s wonderful images up close, to catch up with Noel himself, and this time to be able to share the experience with my daughter who is currently studying at the university.

I’ve written before about Noel’s work and have to admit I am a very big fan of his work. Perhaps the most fascinating thing about his pictures is the length of time you can be engaged in his still films. Conventional photographs can be seen very quickly. It is a difficult task to create a photo that has many visual layers or interconnections that can hold the viewer’s attention. We tend to see the image, accept the truth of the photo and quickly assimilate the key points, and discard the unwanted information, just as we do when looking at the real world. To lift a photo out of the ordinary we can try a number of different ploys – an unusual angle, reflections, depth of field effects, dramatic lighting, a particularly interesting subject or really elegant composition.

Olive Grove No 3 © Noel Myles

I would suggest that hand created images – paintings, drawings, etchings, often engender a longer inspection, because we know the image is an abstraction. Every line, mark or brush stroke was placed there by the artist for some reason. We look, we wonder, we interpret, we spent time with the picture.

Along the Stour Valley © Noel Myles

With still films or joiners, each cell has been placed there too by the artist. We can’t see the whole picture in one go, so we spend time trying to piece together the story. Each individual cell is a photo, loaded with information which suddenly needs more careful observation than it would do in isolation. Each taken at a different time and place, build up a visual memory of the piece, we see patches where the cells join up and we start to see the whole picture.

Suffolk winter © Noel Myles

Another interesting phenomenon is the way in which the eye moves across the pictures. I find that I will scan the whole still film in different ways each time I look at it; across this row first and then down that column one time, then a completely different route the next time. It is like looking a strip of movie film that is continually being chopped up and re-edited into a new sequence on every subsequent view. The story is told slightly different on each viewing.

Noel Myles has been developing this work for decades now. His pictures are pictures are so fascinating not only for the overall compositions he creates, but also because of the dialogue that he builds into adjacent cells to create an overall narrative. I strongly recommend that if you are in Cambridge any time before Christmas, give yourself a good hour or so to go over to see Noel’s exhibition. And maybe get yourself a very nice Christmas present.

Paradise - an exhibition by Noel Myles, is on display at the Alison Richard Building Friday 12 October to Thursday 20 December

A Bigger Photo

Oak at Wormingford © Noel Myles

As day two in an indulgent long weekend enjoying art, this Saturday just gone I visited the opening of Noel Myles exhibition at the Gainsborough house in Sudbury, deep in rural Suffolk.

I had first seen Noel’s impressive work featured on a couple of occasions in the much missed Ag journal. Noel works on photographic collages or joiners, and picked up the joiner baton where Hockney dropped it, expanding the range and scope of what joiners can do, as well as bringing other photographic methods into the process. His work is primarily centred on the landscape and the natural world, and his most popular images are of gnarly old oaks that have been photographed over many seasons and from many viewpoints.

Still Film of an Oak, second version © Noel Myles

I got to know him well last year in the preparation of his talk at the 2011 Arena Seminar where he discussed his work and his evolution as an artist. I was keen to see Noels pictures up close. Apart from a treasured print that he gave me as a gift last year, I had only ever seen his work reproduced in magazines or projected digitally. It was a seven hour roundtrip by train to see these pictures, but it was well worth the effort because his pictures are visually stimulating and beautifully crafted. It is a splendid exhibition. 

Sea Wall © Noel Myles

There are examples of many of his groups of pictures, from exquisite platinum & palladium prints, to the mixed palladium/colour prints of oaks, to full colour composites of woodlands near his home in Sudbury. These were strikingly beautiful. Often taken in winter or autumn, these images displayed a rich palette of colours and textures, from blues and purples of frosted leaves in shadow, through silvery reflections of tree silhouettes on water, to bright red leaves contrasted against deep blue skies.

A Short Film of December © Noel Myles

Also of note were the recent Fenland marshes and coast made this past autumn. Quiet, reflective pools in a patchwork of heather and grasses are set against dark brooding skies. These images are both beautiful and sombre.

Autumn Wetlands © Noel Myles

Noel says that he works by photographing in profusion small details that interest him, and then composing and assembling the image in the studio, taking many hundreds or even thousands of photos,  eventually whittling them down to a couple of hundred constituent frames that make up the overall image. These days, all of his images conform to a rectangular grid, but he has previously experimented with free placement of images.

Three Trees © Noel Myles

By normal photographic standards, these images are quite large, despite many being made up from contact prints of 35mm or 645 medium format. The largest images were over 1m in their longest dimension, and feel big and impressive. Not size for size’s sake as you often find in the big photo exhibitions in London, but a natural, organic size. Oaks from many acorns if you will. His latest pictures have been shot digitally, but he still does the compositing from enprints. When the final layout is complete, he then reassembles the composition digitally in Photoshop.

Noel Myles

It is dangerous, but somewhat inevitable, to compare Noel Myles’ still films with David Hockney’s joiners from the 1980s. I would say that Hockney’s joiners were ground breaking, cutting edge back then. As physical artefacts, they are beginning to look dated. In contrast, Noel Myles images seem very fresh and of the moment. Most of his work looks both timeless and modern. It seems a great shame that his work is not more widely known, either in the photographic community or in the larger art world. One day, I hope that it will become more widely recognised. I suggest strongly that you take a day out to Suffolk and have a look for yourself.

Noel Myles: East Anglia and the Stour Valley, is on show at Gainsborough’s House, 31 March – 23 June 2012 www.gainsborough.org . For more of Noel's images please visit www.noelmyles.co.uk .