b. 1952
Expressionist
Marshall Noice came to painting after successfully answering two other artistic callings – music and photography. Even though his mother and uncle had backgrounds in the visual arts, music was his first love and consequently his first career. As a drummer in a rock band, he toured for four years and opened for acts such as the Allman Brothers Band, Cheap Trick, and Tower of Power. Leaving the band because of artistic differences, he moved to Montana where he became fascinated by the photography of Paul Strand, Edward Weston, and Ansel Adams.
This fascination led him to his second career -- that of a professional photographer with a specific niche in photographing art. His work gained prominence and in 1977 he accepted a position as assistant to legendary photographer, Ansel Adams. As opposed to his aggressive use of color in his paintings today, Noice’s photography was limited to black and white.
Inspired by the highly textured paintings of Theodore Waddell, Noice turned his attention to painting in 1989. He began by painting 100 canvases of Blackfeet artifacts on which he experimented with color and perspective. According to Noice, “After those 100 paintings, I’d found what I was looking for in terms of an art process. Color doesn’t trump composition in my work. They’re pretty much on equal footing.”
The technical term for the way he combines dissonant and complementary colors to create tension is “analogous color harmony”. Noice works in both oil and pastel and generally paints with pastels en plein air. In his mind, “The fundamental benefit of working on location is having immediate contact with my subject matter. I need to feel it, to taste it, to experience it. There’s no substitute for that. I respond to the landscape on a subliminal level and what I want to show in my paintings are those sublime aspects that I experience in nature.”
Selected Museum Exhibitions
2008 “Western American Art – South of the Sweet Tea Line II” Booth Western Art Museum, Cartersville, GA
2007 “American Art in Miniature”, Gilcrease Museum, Tulsa, OK
2007 “Black and White to Vivid Color” Hockaday Museum of Art, Kalispell MT
2001 Group Invitational, Yellowstone Art Museum, Billings, MT
1998 One Man Show, Clymer Museum, Ellensburg, WA
1996 Solo Exhibition, National Museum of Wildlife Art, Jackson, WY
