Anthony Noa

Below I have listed some background information about myself, my work and the principles I apply when working as an artist. This includes my background and work as a visual artist as well as a performing artist.

I have been influenced by many people and places, many of them are historical and the only 'reality' left of them is their work. Some are very well known visual artists such as Michelangelo, da Vinci, Rembrandt, Monet, Renoir, van Gogh, Manet, Parrish, Sargent and Klimt; others, though not as well known, left a significant impression on me such as Frank Weston Benson and Edmund Tarbell. I learned as much as I could of their work process through books and images. I painted my favorite pieces from each of them, and over time developed a palette and work process I could call my own.

As a performing artist (classical ballet) I learned how light and movement, a body shaping space, could have an impact the same as a painting: images that move, making patterns and shapes like a cubist work; or a large pageantry of movement like a Rubens; or complicated interlocking chain like a Pollock. Another common ground I personally found was the connection between learning and understanding. I danced many Balanchine ballets and by doing them I got to know him in a singular way. It was the same copying the works of visual artists and learning about their palettes and processes. When I retired after twenty years as a dancer, I took these ideas into my work as a choreographer and painter. Over the years both arts, visual and performing, have blended together, and now as I begin my work as a full time visual artist, I find attention to detail and creativity as natural as breathing.

I learned to take photos of my work, how to light them, camera settings, etc., to capture as clear as possible the texture and color of each work. Pass your cursor over the image and you will see the details of the brush and knife work. I hope you enjoy viewing them as much as I did creating them.

Anthony Noa

I have been drawing and painting since I was five years old. In grade school my art teacher gave me a large book on classical artists which included Rembrandt, Michelangelo, Titian and da Vinci to encourage me to try more complicated work. The drawings and paintings I copied fueled my desire to be a working artist. When I was twelve I discovered a book of Japanese woodcut prints my grandmother had in her large library. This began my fascination with Japanese art and culture, and forming my ideas about line and color. It was through the study of Japanese art that led me to discover Impressionism. I grew up in a large university town that allowed access to its libraries. There I found books on the impressionist artists, especially Renoir, Monet, Seurat, Cezanne, Morisot and Manet, but my favorite was an American impressionist, Frank Weston Benson. I copied their work extensively, learning their method and color palettes.

At sixteen I discovered another art form that was to be my career for thirty-five years — classical ballet. During the first twenty of those years I continued with my visual arts, especially in the summers when we were on layoff. On an average I completed twenty to thirty works a year, mostly in the impressionist style, interspersed with forays into cubism and French expressionism. During this time I never looked for my own style or a particular subject matter, nor did I do shows or seek representation, I was just interested in learning the technique of many different masters.

When I retired as a professional dancer, I took a year to explore the possibility of returning to the visual arts as a career, but another great career opportunity came to me as an artistic director and choreographer. Shortly after this I bought my first computer with a high end graphics monitor and a wacom tablet. For the next 15 years the computer absorbed all my visual arts urges. It was easier to work on my drawing skills with the computer, as my duties as artistic director absorbed most of my life with very little down time. After retiring from my last position as Artistic Director of a professional ballet company, my enthusiasm for the PC as an art medium waned and I found myself drawn back to the tactile feel of brush and paint. I began to work exclusively in encaustics, and, as I was living in India at the time, I was inspired by the luminosity of ancient wax paintings. Eventually I returned to oils, but what I took away from my encaustic work dramatically changed my work in oils: canvas mounted on a wood panel for a sturdy support, using a hand muller to make my own paint with pigment, wax, walnut oil and marble dust to control texture and the heavy "butter-i-ness" of the paint, and extensive use of the palette knife.

My subject matter is basically in four areas: landscape, still life, figurative, and just recently, allegory. My idea of landscape work is still strongly influenced by impressionism, and it influences all my work, including still life and figurative: hue, value and chroma of pure color using no blacks and or earth colors. Still life for me is similar to landscape — foliage, fruit, flowers and other traditional still life objects, but my favorite part is placing birds and the paintings of my favorite impressionist artist as supporting backgrounds. My figurative work is strongly influenced by my years as a choreographer — light and empty space and richly designed costumes. I have a series, Apple on a Beach, that are nudes where I use my landscape and still life painting skills to encapsulate the figure at rest. My allegory work is inspired by the words and ideas from A Course in Miracles, a revolutionary approach to spirituality that I have been working with since 1988.

As a dancer, teacher and choreographer my feeling for the human figure is profound, having spent many years working with dancers on how to "sculpt" space, using lights and empty space to rhythmically shape movement. As a dance artist I lived in many parts of the world: Berlin, Yugoslavia, Russia, India and China, and as a dancer toured many other places in America, Europe and Asia. All my experience as a dance artist has shaped how I see the world and it profoundly influences my work as a visual artist.

Wooden Panels

I paint on a medium texture, with Oxford 2-over-1 weave canvas mounted to a 1/4 in wood panel (MDF - see below). I grew fond of the panel when I was working in encaustic, and using a palette knife to apply paint, I did not like the spring of a stretched canvas. Also, a paint film on a substrate that does not expand or shrink is less prone to cracking. Encaustic work is fine on a flat sealed panel, but using oils with a brush or palette knife works best on canvas.

MDF (Hudson Highland)
Medium Density Fiberboard (MDF) is a dry-process type fiberboard panel with a density below that of HDF and hardboard. This lower density makes MDF the most warp-resistant wood panel available. Unlike the very dense hardboard fiberboards, fibers in MDF panels have the necessary room within the internal structure of the board to expand (from moisture or heat) without distorting the panel. While this lower density gives MDF somewhat less structural strength than other fiber boards, it is still very hard and strong, and more than adequate in that regard for use as an artist panel, for which it is very well suited.

Oil Paint

I use a mixture of walnut oil, beeswax, and marble dust as a medium to give the outer paint film a slight glossy look that deepens the hue and chroma of my colors. I hand mix most of my paints with a hand Muller, pigment and walnut oil.

Walnut oil is one of the least yellowing oils and take a longer time to dry than linseed. I paint alla prima (wet-on-wet) as I like my paint film to dry as one piece. Walnut oil allows me four or five days to complete before the paint film gets tacky. The beeswax speeds up the dry time somewhat, but the trade-off is a creamery paint. To strengthen the paint film I heat the walnut oil over two days on a very low temperature. The marble dust gives extra body to the paint and increases reflectivity of light.

Panel Structure

Each panel is completely sealed, that includes the 1/4 inch edge. I also put a 1/2 inch thick MDF frame to the back of the wood panel that is approximately. 2 inches from the edges. This back-frame is used to hang the painting. I seal the canvas to the wooden panel with a matte gel that adheres perfectly flat and is permanent. After completing the painting I paint the edges (wrap around) to match the face of the painting. The back-frame stands the painting off the wall a half-inch and, because of the painted edges, does not need a frame. If framed I prefer a floater frame so the edges can be seen. (see panel images)

Work Process

I begin with a general wash that completely removes the white of the canvas. The brushed wash is used to establish the basic light and dark areas, and general color theme for the work. Then I quickly paint a more detailed wash (again with a brush), using dark and muted hues that will help "pop" the knife work I'll use to complete the painting. In most of my work more than 90% of the canvas is covered by the palette knife, though in some works I'll leave a generous portion of the underlying wash show through. It takes between two to three weeks for the surface of the paint film to completely dry, so I usually wait about two or three months before I post a new work for sale, depending on the thickness of the paint. I give it a varnish layer using Gamvar Satin Varnish — protects the surface when cleaning and easy to remove or refinish.

As an artist I look for the silent, the unseen, the unexpressed as being as telling as the spoken, the visible, the obvious. Dogen-zenji said, "... light implies the presence of the shadows and it is the shadows that are loved". It is the underlying beauty waiting to be discovered that gives me my most satisfying moments as an artist: the range of expression hinted at, touched on, rather than depicted. When I create, there are always other forces at work, so I am open and allow for surprises. Making workable choices in a crucible of informative mistakes becomes my guide in the face of what cannot be seen, only hinted at, or in an emotional sense, felt. My creativity lives in an arena where mistakes are not only possible but necessary.

I believe art imitates life in a compelling way. Highlighting certain aspects of life, subtlety underplaying others, art can shift the viewer's perception about what it means to be human. Picasso said, "Art is a lie that makes us realize the truth, at least the truth that is given to us to understand." I believe that there is no place where we do not connect.

Noa began his ballet studies at the Alabama School of Fine Arts and after an introductory period of schooling shifted his interest toward pedagogy and choreography. Over a twenty year period he danced as a soloist and principal with many ballet companies such as Ballet UAB, Cincinnati / New Orleans City Ballet, Berlin Ballet (Deutsche Oper in West Berlin), Nevada Ballet Theatre, Ballet Austin and as a principal guest artist with the Serbian National Theatre in Yugoslavia.

For ten years he was the Artistic Director for Northern Plains Ballet, a full regional company and pre-professional school, and then a professional ballet company. During his time with NPB, he was awarded a certificate of excellence by the Governor of North Dakota for his educational contributions to the Bismarck Public Schools, and two NEA grants.

Work like you don't need money, love like you've never been hurt, and dance like nobody's watching.
Leroy "Satchel" Paige

Art is a lie that makes us realize the truth, at least the truth that is given to us to understand.
Pablo Picasso

Only a biker knows why a dog sticks his head out the window.
Unknown

"Louer le Dieu de tous, boire le vin, laisser le monde est le" - Praise the God of all, drink the wine, let the world be
Unknown (French proverb)

Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist.
Pablo Picasso

In the end, what it comes down to is that it's a fine line between becoming too enamored of your own success and maintaining the confidence to do what you do and do it well.
Justin Kirk

Saying that cultural objects have value is like saying telephones have conversations.
Brian Eno

Those who dance are considered insane by those who can't hear the music.
George Carlin

The classical world emerges from the quantum in a comprehensible way: you might say that classical physics is simply what quantum physics looks like at the human scale.
Philip Ball

We make our decisions. And then our decisions turn around and make us.
F.W. Boreham

If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.
Albert Einstein

The difference between stupidity and genius is that genius has its limits.
Albert Einstein

Unus pro omnibus, omnes pro uno (One for all, and all for one)
Unknown

Time is nature’s way of keeping everything from happening all at once.
National Geographic Magazine (March 1990, p. 109)

Everyone is exactly the same in one way: they believe they are different from everyone else.
Unknown

Be not concerned for the future of your art, but what you may do now, in this time, in this place, the frame of mind where you seem to exist. What comes after is not your concern, only now.
Anthony Noa

True forgiveness is seeing there was never a need to forgive.
Anthony Noa

I don't want to be a part of history, but wake from it.
Anthony Noa

Nothing real can be threatened. Nothing unreal exists. Herein lies the peace of God.
ACIM