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David Noble
David Noble studied at the Byam Shaw School of Drawing and Painting, London, and at the Department of Fine Art, Newcastle University. His PGCE was from the Institute of Education, London University. He taught art for 26 years in secondary education and has been running drawing courses in East Sussex since 2010.
Since his student days, and outside his subsequent teaching commitments, David continued his interest in combining two and three dimensional elements in his work, thinking about the relationship between image and structure. The physical context of the image has been a lasting interest, and he spent a few years experimenting and constructing works in relief. He also became interested in installation work, reliefs and images closely related to the sites in which they would be viewed.
For any artist, maintaining creative continuity and simultaneously fulfilling a teaching programme can become a major struggle. David was involved with the constant generation of new ideas needed in the teaching environment. This was a different kind of thought process energy than required in the gradual evolution of ideas in his own work and the two proved incompatible. David has become sympathetic to creative people whose life circumstances have unavoidably and adversely affected their creative continuity and therefore their creative output.
self portrait 2001
Teaching is about sharing. After a few years away from teaching David was encouraged to share his passion for drawing. He embarked on teaching drawing in courses over whose design and content he had complete control. This has led to a reappraisal of his ideas about drawing, about what it means to be creative and how all this fits into the art world in general.
David shares the widely held belief that that artists need to start their careers equipping themselves with certain basic skills and, importantly, understanding why these skills are relevant. It’s of general interest anyway understanding how the world appears to us from our own physicality and position in space, and how to represent this pictorially. There is a strong and valid argument against influencing the mindset of creative students, but we are primarily visual animals and live in a visual world. Familiarizing ourselves with the dynamics of colour and visual form, understanding linear perspective and being able to represent the world pictorially, as for instance in representational drawing, are essential ingredients for the gestation of creative ideas.