Marshall Noice | Landscapes of the Heart

Marshall Noice’s woodland scenes push the limits between representation and abstraction

By Norman Kolpas

Marshall Noice, Clark Fork Orchard, oil, 48 x 60.

This story was featured in the June 2020 issue of Southwest Art magazine. Get the Southwest Art June 2020 print issue or digital download now–then subscribe to Southwest Art and never miss another story.

WHETHER THEY are large-format oils or small-scale pastels, paintings by Marshall Noice possess an uncanny power to draw the viewer into a dreamlike state. Often representing densely packed groves of aspens, pines, and other trees, these artworks are full of mesmerizing fields of color with indistinct edges—brilliant reds, oranges, and yellows; tranquil blues and greens—that seem to vibrate hypnotically before the eyes. Slender trunks all but sway across the canvas. Synesthesia may even set in, letting us hear the rustle of leaves or the creaking of branches.

Such sensory saturation proves that Noice has achieved his goal of creating artworks that “resonate with a sense of place.” Ironically, in pursuit of that goal, few of his works actually strive to be faithful representations of the places that first inspired them. “Even though I’ll go out and do pastel sketches on location,” he says, “at the end of the day, a painting certainly doesn’t have to look like the scene I was sitting in front of. It just has to feel right.” From his initial act of applying color to a piece’s final impact on the viewer, he aims always for images that are “experiential and visceral and intuitive, no head and all heart.”

: Marshall Noice, First Green of Spring, pastel, 15 x 15.

: Marshall Noice, Distance, oil, 48 x 48.

: Marshall Noice, Lone Pine Maples, oil, 108 x 60.

FROM HIS earliest years, Noice has felt a passionate connection to the world of art. Two childhood mementoes, in particular, eloquently attest to that fact. He came across the first fairly recently, while going through a box of old photographs from his great-grandparents and other forebears who emigrated from Norway to North Dakota, where Noice was born. “Inside that box, I found a folded-up piece of paper with a red crayon taped to it. And in very childlike lettering on the paper it said, ‘This crayon is for Marshall Noice.’ Whoever gave me that crayon so long ago cast the die,” he says, “because red has always been particularly important to me. It’s a visually demanding color with magnetic power to the viewer. There are few people who don’t respond strongly to the color red.”

Another early keepsake proves his longstanding desire to record images: An old enamelware cookie jar—which once belonged to his grand-mother and is now safeguarded by his mother—bears a rudimentary line drawing of a cowboy that Noice reckons he scrawled sometime before he was 3 years old. “It’s a straight-on circle with eyes, nose, and a smiling mouth, wearing a hat with a turned-up brim on both sides and two dents in the crown, just like a real cowboy hat,” Noice says.

This early need to express himself visually continued to develop throughout Noice’s school years, first in Moorhead, MN, and later in Kalispell, MT. Along the way, he says, “there were a couple of teachers who were wise enough to tell me that I could sit at my desk and draw all I wanted to, as long as I was paying attention.” Not that his attention didn’t sometimes wander, he admits. “In 10th-grade biology, I would draw pictures of what the teacher was talking about, or of the girl sitting in front of me, or what was going on outside the window.”

: Marshall Noice, Barn, Foy’s Lake, pastel, 15 x 15.

: Marshall Noice, Warm Light Hillside, oil, 48 x 60.

: Marshall Noice, Beneath a Yellow Ridge, oil, 36 x 36.

Truth be told, however, at the time Noice more intensely channeled his creative energy in another direction: music. He played drums in bands throughout high school and continued on through his peripatetic college studies, which took him to a succession of higher-learning institutions—from Kalispell to Spokane, Monterey to Missoula—“pretty much predicated on whether or not there was a place to play rock and roll in that community.” As part of a band called Applejack, he even toured as an opening act for big-name groups like The Allman Brothers Band, Cheap Trick, and Tower of Power. Eventually, he says, “the road wore me out, loading our own gear and driving overnight from Chicago to Denver for the next show.”

So Noice settled down back home in Kalispell and began making his living primarily through yet another creative medium: photography. “I was certain I was going to be the next Ansel Adams,” he says of his black-and-white landscape photography, which brought him a few museum shows, some magazine articles, and “a nice small book.” More practically, he also branched out to taking large-format architectural photos, photographs of bronzes for sculptors in the area, and even baby pictures and portraits of graduating high-school seniors.

But he never abandoned his interest in art. “All the while, I was painting for the love of it,” he says, in his studio on Main Street. “My typical work schedule included painting on Wednesday mornings and all day on Saturdays.” In the early 1980s, he and his buddy Terry Nelson collaborated on expressionist figurative canvases as large as 6 by 20 feet, which earned them a few museum shows across the state; that satisfying creative partnership came to an end when Nelson moved to New Mexico.

: Marshall Noice, Birch Grove Lakeside, oil, 68 x 68.

: Marshall Noice, Blue Hill Wood, pastel, 15 x 15.

: Marshall Noice, Cloudbank, oil, 48 x 48.

In early 1992, new inspiration came to Noice when he saw a show of modernist, large-format, heavily impastoed western images by Montana painter Theodore Waddell. “At that time, I’d been photographing the world’s largest collection of Blackfeet Indian artifacts—beadwork and parfleches and quillwork in extraordinarily bright and bold colors. And I thought it would really be cool to do paintings of those artifacts with that same approach to paint handling, blowing up those images to the point at which they became almost abstract.” Inspired by that vision, Noice went on to complete about a hundred such canvases. “And then I loaded up my Dodge Caravan with as many paintings as I could and drove them to Santa Fe,” where he showed them to respected artist and gallerist Phyllis Kapp at Waxlander Gallery. “She immediately decided she wanted to handle them, so I left the paintings with her, came back to Kalispell, loaded my van again, and showed my work to Beth Overcast at Center Street Gallery in Jackson.” She took on the artworks, too.

Just a few months later, Noice’s “light-bulb moment” came when, in quick succession, both galleries phoned him to say they were sold out and needed more work. “It immediately became obvious to me that maybe I could make my living as a painter,” he remembers. Gradually cutting down on his photography assignments, he increased his painting time to two days a week, then three, then four. After three years, he had just one photography job left on the books, and in 1999, at the age of 47, he announced to his wife Jackie that he would be a painter full time.

: Marshall Noice, Cut Wheat, Flathead, oil, 46 x 70.

: Marshall Noice, East of the Red Revisited, oil, 30 x 48.

: Marshall Noice, Fallen Leaves, pastel, 15 x 15.

THE TRANSITION to the landscape subjects for which Noice is now known came in a manner just as logical yet serendipitous. “I was painting a Blackfeet leather war shirt decorated with lengths of winter weasel skins,” he says, which formed a series of white vertical elements on the larger-than-life-size canvas. “When I walked 25 feet away and looked back, I saw aspen trees. I finished that painting as a grove of aspens and never painted another Indian artifact. I’ve always been a proponent of being given the idea for my next painting from the painting I’m working on. Those vertical elements still echo in my paintings to this day.”

To say that trees are Noice’s sole subject matter, however, would be a dramatic oversimplification that fails to take into account the intellectual range and emotional depth he continually explores. Noice finds vast worlds to examine within his closely defined territory. One of those worlds is the nature of color itself, just as abstract painter and theorist Josef Albers (1888-1976) plumbed that subject’s depths and intricacies in the hundreds of paintings that make up his series Homage to the Square. Indeed, Noice quotes Albers’ 1963 book Interaction of Color as an inspiration for a recent painting entitled DISTANCE: “Therefore,” Albers wrote, “we try to recognize our preferences and our aversions—what colors dominate in our work; what colors, on the other hand, are rejected, disliked, or of no appeal. Usually a special effort in using disliked colors ends with our falling in love with them.”

In just that way, says the artist whose iconic touchstone was a bright-red crayon, “I’ve always had an aversion to gray, so I decided to make a special effort” to feature it in a canvas. He began the 48-by-48-inch image with an underpainting consisting of broad horizontal bands of “wacky pink, gold ochre, and viridian green, knowing from the beginning that there would only be glimpses of those colors” in the finished work. Over those tones, he strategically painted his woodland composition in strokes of cool Payne’s gray and warmer Gamblin Portland gray. “I always think of what I might do in a painting in terms of cool-warm, light-dark, thick-thin, soft-hard. There’s a certain tension that’s created,” he explains. By the time he had finished the painting, Noice admits, “I did, in fact, fall in love with gray.”

: Marshall Noice, Grove in Shade, oil, 60 x 48.

: Marshall Noice, Holt Stage Road, oil, 30 x 40.

: Marshall Noice, In a Softer Light, oil, 48 x 48.

Personal challenges like that one keep the 68-year-old artist energetically at work, always posing himself new creative challenges. “What interests me,” he says, “is pushing the subject matter even further, from a literal landscape to the point where such references are even less obvious or questionably even there. Pure abstraction doesn’t get me excited at all. I want the viewer to look at the piece and be engaged in anything but the subject matter. Then, at some point in looking at the painting, a light bulb would come on and they would say, ‘That might be a horizon line or landscape forms.’ I’m not sure it can be done, but I’d like to paint a picture where there is an absolute dead heat between the subject matter and all of the painterly qualities.”

representation
Ventana Fine Art, Santa Fe, NM; Renaissance Fine Arts, Baltimore, MD; Merritt Gallery, Chevy Chase, MD, and Haverford, PA; Lustre Gallery, Telluride, CO; M.A. Doran Gallery, Tulsa, OK; Anne Loucks Gallery, Glencoe, IL; Montana Modern Fine Art, Kalispell, MT; Old Main Gallery, Bozeman, MT.