Bethany Noel

Bethany Noel Art

ARTIST STATEMENT & BIOGRAPHY

I am a professional artist selling my work across the United States. I began selling my artwork when I was 14 years old while also attending Boston University BioMedical Engineering programs for 18 months while also in high school. I originally attended Reed College pursuing a biology and chemistry degree. I was selling my artwork privately throughout college and executing on 98’ murals while also pursuing my biochemistry degree. I was teaching fifth graders biology while also making and selling paintings. I had intended to pursue a medical degree, but I finally applied to art schools and Rhode Island School of Design offered me one of their two merit scholarships. I graduated a year early from Rhode Island School of Design in 2011 with a degree in Painting and having been on the Dean’s list for two consecutive semesters. I have had chronic migraines for over twenty years of my life, and it has informed the way I perceive the world. One of my daily symptoms is an ocular disturbance called ‘aura’. I see lights, colors, airplane chemical trail effects, black holes, and other unsettling but beautiful neurological artifacts superimposed in my vision. In the management of my condition, I’ve made the choice to see the good, weird, and beautiful, and I hope my paintings help my viewers find bits of unexpected joy in the natural world.

After a severe migraine attack, I have always doubted what I experienced, how bad the pain was, what I saw. My paintings have been the argument against gaslighting myself and functioned as a silver lining. Instead of going to an emotionally dark place, I use my art to find the glory in being alive and having a brain spit out dizzyingly beautiful optical effects people take drugs or find religion to experience.

I paint about the woods, as it has always been a refuge. In the city, the amount of light and color and data I’m taking in is overwhelming, but in the woods, the same symptoms turn an average hike into an exploration of Narnia. I’m highly sensitive to light, sound, and smell, so the tree canopy, the flickering light through branches, the camouflaged patterning of leaves and brush break into and apart from each other in incredible, Alice-in-Wonderland type glory. I mirror this experience in my work - obsessive, detailed, and overwhelmed by color. In my paintings primed with black gesso, I use the black of the canvas to be the darkness and shadow and add the light and form in a swirling, patterning effect that mimics the aura I see all the time. I hope by seeing my work I can give my viewers a key to see the beauty all around us.

I want the weeds to be seen, the parts that are so often trimmed back, routinely oversimplified in paintings. A gorgeous morning scene in the woods would not be half so beautiful without the multitude of craggy leaves, weeds, and brush to reflect the light back to the viewer. On their own they are easily dismissed; on its own beige is boring. Yet the burnt yellow ochre and muddy red oxide of the underbrush are necessary to make the green foliage glow.

Being an artist feels like having a primary language that is non-verbal. I think in color, shape, and line. I constantly have an ache in my chest to be in my studio making the thing, trying to get the feeling into the world. When I mix paint and find that right bit of color with that right brushwork, and the line here is just right- there is nothing like it. It is joy and catharsis, hope and solace. It's reading a really good book late into the night with a mug of earl grey or dancing weird with your dog.

It's crying to a song in a foreign language because it knows and you know. And when someone else feels those feels just by looking at my painting? I'm seen and they are seen. I can explain color theory and the optical mechanics of the paint and mediums I'm using. I can explain composition and form and why, technically, this piece works. But you don't need to know music theory to get goosebumps from a good song. Same with art.

My painting technique is a unique method I developed due to my proficiency with acrylic paints (my neurological disease meant that I had to stay away from oil paints and mediums). I developed a method that mimics physically the way my neurological symptoms project aura over my vision.

The darkness of the black gessoed canvas is revealed in my paintings. I paint the bramble, the foliage, the overlooked and let the traditionally ‘primary’ objects be revealed through negation. I work with gesso in an additive and subtractive way - I control the opacity, transparency, and gloss of the paint to create a layered illusion of light and space. Pigments behave differently than theoretical color; paint is pigment in emulsion. I can layer and mix to let different bits of paint catch and reflect light in different ways. I apply black gesso on top of other paint and it will optically look recessed due to its matte nature. It absorbs light. I also use chalk pastel and white gesso in my paintings. Titanium white gesso is not very opaque; Titanium has much less carrying capacity than lead white. Therefore I use it, mixed with other mediums and pigments, as a glazing and tinting medium. I also work on my canvases with chalk pastel. Pastel is merely a compressed pigment; pushing it into the texture of a canvas lets the dust settle into the fabric weave. I wipe the pigment away to remove it and also mix gesso and other paint into it to dye the canvas and create layered illusions.