Noice landscape art finds national audience

Posted: Saturday, Feb 09, 2008 - 12:35:59 am MST
By CANDACE CHASE The Daily Inter Lake

Marshall Noice paints in his studio Tuesday in the back of his gallery on Main Street in Kalispell. After working in black-and-white photography for many years, Noice crossed over to oil painting with bright saturated colors. Garrett Cheen photos/Daily Inter Lake

Marshall Noice has spent 36 years obsessed by landscapes.

In his Main Street studio and gallery, the artist paints layer upon layer of brilliantly hued oils, inspired by a color in a sunrise or a stand of trees intersecting the horizon. Even in his 23 years as a photographer, Noice recalled his inner drive to interpret landscapes.

“It’s more than something I’ve been involved with,” Noice said, pondering his passion. “It’s like it’s something that’s essential.”

Since retiring as a photographer, Noice has earned a national following as a contemporary expressionist artist with work in galleries in Santa Fe, Jackson Hole, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Chicago, Los Angeles, New York and other hot spots.

Noice sells about 98 percent of his art in areas other than in Montana. Contemporary art finds its largest following in urban environments.

“In Jackson Hole, my work is kind of wild and out there,” he said with a laugh. “In New York, it’s slightly tame and anachronistic.”

Happily for Noice, his work not only sells in diverse venues, it continues to increase in value by about 10 percent a year. He finds that success gratifying since he never considered painting as a source of income.

“It’s been something I pursued for the love of doing it,” he said.

Noice said he started drawing and painting as early as 3 years old. While running his photography business at 1020 S. Main, he also painted for pleasure, sharing his present studio at 127 Main St. with artist Terry Nelson in the early 1980s.

Two seminal experiences began his transition in art forms from photography to oil painting.

“Number one, I spent three months photographing Bob Scriver’s collection of Blackfeet artifacts to illustrate a book that was being published,” Noice said.

Then he had a photography show at the National Museum of Wildlife Art in Jackson Hole, Wyo. While in Jackson, he encountered works by Theodore Wadell, a renowned artist and former art instructor at the University of Montana.

“When I saw these paintings of his, it was one of those ‘ah ha’ moments when the light bulb goes on,” he said.

Noice said he realized he wanted to paint the Blackfeet artifacts he had photographed in the style of Wadell, which he described as loose and expressive with heavily applied paint.

“Pretty much like I paint now,” he said. “I came back and started painting war shirts and headdresses.”

When finished in 1989, Noice loaded up his Dodge Caravan with his new work and headed to Santa Fe. The paintings found favor with Waxlander Gallery on the famed Canyon Road row of art establishments, a real coup for Noice.

He also placed work in the Center Street Gallery in the highly competitive Jackson Hole art community.

“Much to my surprise, they started to sell,” Noice said. “I didn’t think demand would turn out to be as strong.”

After six months, he realized that he needed to spend more time painting. Noice decided to use his studio for photography for four days, then convert it for painting for two days each week.

Then he moved photography back to three days, then two days, then one day until he retired completely to pursue painting exclusively. It took him about a year to make the transition, since he had a lot of work booked in advance and people counted on him.

Although he loved photography and the people he served, Noice said he found his greatest satisfaction in painting. He called it a higher form of self expression.

“In creating an oil painting, I’m not accountable to anyone but myself,” he said. “The only person I have to please at the end of the day is me.”

With his devotion to authenticity, Noice didn’t hesitate to switch from the American Indian themes that won gallery approval to landscapes when prompted urgently by his inner muse.

He called it another “light bulb” moment. Noice was painting a war shirt that belonged to the Blackfeet Chief Two Guns White Calf.

“It was decorated with winter weasel — white weasel tails,” Noice said.

In the process of painting, the tails turned into a stand of aspen. He never painted another artifact, but his landscape work sold just as well.

Noice has a show in Santa Fe every summer, another in Jackson Hole each fall and shows in Los Angeles and Chicago every couple of years. New galleries continue to court him, including one in Denver that he has an appointment to visit this month.

Noice estimates that he has spent at least 10,000 hours with a brush in his hand, working each day to perfect his approach. He remains largely self-schooled, having taken just a few formal classes.

He developed his signature technique from reading many art books and studying thousands of paintings. Using a“highly analytical” approach, Noice said he pinpointed what attracted him to a given painting, taking note of the composition, use of color and paint application technique.

Along with Wadell, Noice listed abstract expressionist artists Pierre Bonnard and Marc Rothko as major influences in developing his own intuitive and personal point of view.

Noice credits Joe Abbrescia with formalizing his approach to color in adding dissonant to complementary colors to create tension in a painting. Abbrescia called the technique analogous color harmony.

“I still do it every single day,” he said. “I’m very indebted to Joe Abbrescia.”

Living in the Flathead provides an endless source of daily inspiration, Noice said. In good weather, he travels to areas such as Glacier National Park with a stack of pastel drawing paper and a box of pencils to create sketches for paintings.

The artist works on a dozen or more paintings at one time, allowing each layer to dry before he applies the next to keep the colors crisp through 10 to 15 applications of paint. Weeks, months and even years later, he asks himself if a work is complete.

“It’s probably the most important question I ask myself as an artist,” he said.

Noice said each painting presents a number of problems to solve with composition, color and painting techniques. He deems a work done when he sees that he has no more issues to resolve.

Occasionally, he declares a painting unworthy of continuing by cutting a large X through the center. Noice moves on immediately to another.

The artist said he never faces a blank canvas with a void of ideas.

“My greatest strength is my curiosity,” he said. “It’s almost as if the process of creating one painting opens the door to the next,” Noice said.

He said he likes the discipline of following a schedule of painting five days a week in his Kalispell studio when he isn’t traveling.

“I try to be putting paint on canvas by 8 or no later than 9 a.m.,” he said. “I’m cleaning brushes at 5.”

With a wife, four children, two grandchildren (and a third on the way), four dogs, four horses and legions of cats, Noice, 56, enjoys a full life outside the painting studio.

Otherwise, he said he could easily get caught up in painting day and night, seven days a week. Noice said he loves every aspect of painting, up to and including the smell and the sticky feel of his oil medium.

“If someone told me I had just six months to live, I wouldn’t change a thing,” he said.