Upcoming Exhibition

I am currently creating a new piece of art for an exhibition at the Bathhouse Gallery in Dallas called Verse and Reverse. I like the idea of the show, artists submit a piece of existing artwork that a writer will write a poem or short story about. That same writer will give a story to the artist so they can do a piece of artwork on it. There are 8 artists and 8 writers participating in this show.

Right now I'm working on the artwork for the short story I was given. I picked out a very small segment of the story, just one line, to do the piece on. The writer is going to write a short story about the painting Dinner With Bacchus Giraffe. I'm looking forward to reading his interpretation of the painting.

The show runs March 15th - April 12th, the reception is March 15th from 7-9.

Asleep

In 2001 we (me, my wife and a friend) took a trip to Japan. While there I drew my wife taking a nap. I'm not sure which city we were in at the time, I think Hakone.


The first drawing I made of her asleep was while we were on our honeymoon in Paris. This is probably my favorite drawing Ive ever done. I like the landscape quality. It seems like the pillow is a mountainside and her hair is a forest or meadow, falling down into a ravine behind her arm. The space under her shirt sleeve reminds me of a cave. It seems that the earth itself could awake from her nap, slowly opening her eternal eyes. To me this drawing sparks the association of Gaia, mother earth and the manifestation of that in my beautiful wife sleeping (after a long days walk through the Louvre).

I really enjoy these drawings of Nikki sleeping, I plan on doing a series of these.

Sun, Tree, Home

We try to escape nature by building an artificial world around us, yet we are making this artificial world out of nature itself. This artwork is about cycles and the relationship of materials. On my website I describe this painting as the relation between our sun, the earth, and what we use of the earth and call "man-made". Sounds a bit vague, right? I'll explain through the symbols on the painting.

The sun provides the light and energy to Earth and without it we wouldn't be here, it is essential to us and in a way has help to build us and all of our fellow earthlings. It takes a beam of light from the sun about 8 minutes to travel to Earth's surface. In the painting you can see the wiggly, swirling vibrations coming down the stairs from the window showing the Sun. After the sunlight reaches the Earth it is "used" by pretty much every living thing, such as a tree. An Oak tree, for example, can live up to around 600 years old. Thats 600 years of sunlight and water. Man will use an Oak tree for construction, essentially harvesting the tree that the Sun and Earth have created. We use trees and other substances natural to Earth to make our creations, such as buildings (trees, rock, sand) roads, and various consumer objects. The straight lined shapes (man-constructed) intertwine and are hard to distinguish from the more organic swirling shapes (natural) in this painting.

We call these objects we construct "man-made", but we are using the material of Earth and Sun to make these objects. So these things are being constructed by man, but not made by man. Just as a society of ants will construct very complicated dwellings out of the Earth around them, we humans also construct very complicated dwellings out of the Earth around us. The complexity and use of these constructions are relative to the one who judges.

There is a quote from Carl Sagan thats sums it up best...“If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe.”

Untitled

With this drawing (and a couple of others completed around the same time) I wanted to try something a bit different so I painted different shades of yellow on drawing paper then drew my wife on top of that. I like the outcome, it gives it a certain cloud like atmosphere. I also like the expression of curiosity I capture on my wifes face, it seems like she was studying me as I was drawing her.

With the line style I use in this and other drawings I'm trying to capture the idea of constant change that is always going on around us. Nothing is ever still, not even a rock. You have the movement of Nikki before she sat down for me to draw her, the movement afterwards, the small movements imperceptible to the eye, the vibrations and movements on an anatomical level, and the myriad of movements inside her body.

I plan on continuing with the ideas and techniques used in this drawing on future pieces.

Female Flatworm Amazon Guardian

Female Flatworm Amazon Guardian completed in 1999 is a vertical diptych. I first completed the bottom half in a very clean style around 1994 or so. In 1999 I added the top half or 'head' of the painting. I also create a rough, worn look to the painting to convey a certain wear and tear (I'll explain the analogy further down), along with small inner-drawings throughout the character's body and head.

The idea of this painting is about women, and the role woman have played and been subjected to all throughout history including our own present day. Women throughout history in various cultures have been the victims of oppression and violence, yet still are the archetypes of grace and beauty. The bottom half is a display of the female form, the part artist and poets have always glorified, the part men usually focus on. The top half of the painting acts as a peephole, showing a glimpse of the part of women that has been subject to oppression and abuse, offering a look at the collective mirror that time has a hold of, as in the book The Picture of Dorian Gray.

I've included a sketch on the female figure's body of a young boy listening to a father, as the father passes on the idiotic idea of mans dominance of woman, of subjecting them to harsh treatment, making them feel like second class citizens. Men pass on this illogical idea of a woman’s inequality to boys, mostly through example. Western religions perpetrate this absurd idea, which is why the father in the small sketch has a halo over his head. I also show an illustration on the woman’s head of a young lady coming to this realization, of her imposed inequality. Even today, here in the US I see men treating their girlfriends or wives not as a partner but as a type of subtle servant.

The Amazon guardian in the artwork stands as a symbol for the courage, the will and timeless persistence that woman throughout history have kept, that idea in the back of their mind (and sometimes right in the front for everyone to see), that they are not second class, they are not servants to be belittled, but they are the mothers of humanity, the archetypes of beauty and grace, despite some mens actions of arrogance and ignorance.

I sold this to a great person in New Mexico who has bought a number of my paintings.

The Evolution of Bacchus Giraffe

I have a reoccurring character in some of my paintings, he is Bacchus, the Roman God of wine and intoxication, but in the evolved form of a giraffe.

The first painting he appeared in was a diptych titled Bacchus Giraffe…Drunken God of Mythology in 1999. In this painting a woman is shown getting herself drunk, to escape her worries. She is a devoted follower of Bacchus. In time her head detaches from this dimension and floats into the welcoming arms of Bacchus the Giraffe. He licks her head as if it were a fruit, his saliva acting as an elixir, releasing her from the pain she is enduring, easing her from worry. When I first drew this painting on canvas Bacchus was an ulgy, monster like bearded man. I painted over the man with a giraffe. At first I didn't like this painting very much, but now its one of my favorites.

The next piece of artwork Bacchus Giraffe appears in is a bit more comical, not as dark as its predecessor. Its titled Dinner with Bacchus Giraffe, and it shows Bacchus the Giraffe God as an almost unwelcome guest. The woman at the dinner table wrestles with the option of drinking to escape her worries. This woman has more hope and courage, she thinks of facing her problems with a clear mind, not giving into intoxication as a means of escape. But the thought of giving up and drinking is tempting to her and she is seen gazing at Bacchus Giraffe's amusing advances with a subtle curiosity. I created this painting in one day.

The last of my paintings (so far) that shows a giraffe, is not necessarily Bacchus. This giraffe is not trying to intoxicate people into escaping their worries but acting as a protector and teacher. In Pomegranate Seeds, completed in 2005, the giraffe appears to a man in his dreams and explains the magnificence of life creating itself over and over using a pomegranate as an example. He cuddles the sleeping man, almost sexually, explaining how each tiny pomegranate seed has the potential within to grow into a massive tree that will again produce fruits with tiny seeds that can grow again into massive trees into infinity.

The idea for Pomegranate Seeds appeared to me in a dream. I used the Bacchus like giraffe character not for his associations to the Roman God but simply as a type of guardian angel giraffe. In this painting the giraffe character is stripped of any associations with wine or escape. The giraffe in this painting is the antitheses of escape; he represents birth and rebirth, a message from Providence, the passing on of knowledge. The dream I had continues, the man wakes up after being told about the momentum of life reproducing itself infinitely and the giraffe is gone. He walks along a savanna and finds a sleeping giraffe, and he cuddles the giraffe, whispering into his dreams the secrets of life reproducing itself using a pomegranate as an example. That same giraffe wakes up then finds the man sleeping and this goes on forever.

I had the dream and created the painting in October 2005, the next month my wife found out she was pregnant with our beautiful daughter Zoë.

Introduction

I'd like to introduce myself for those of you who don't know who I am. My artist name is Skip Noah. My real name is Daniel Myers, I acquired the nickname Skip in elementary school. I started painting around 1992/1993 and I would sign my paintings as 'Skip' most of the time. I decided to go with an artist pen name in 2000. I picked Noah after the character Noah in Genesis who saved all the animals. I currently sign my pieces with 'Skip Noah' and go by that name for my art.

I've taught myself how to draw and paint. When I was a kid I would trace cartoon characters on a light up tracing machine my parents got me. Years later when I was in my early 20s I decided to start painting. I showed at a gallery in Deep Ellum called Vincent's Ear. They soon closed down and I didn't seek any other gallery shows.

In 1996 I met my amazing soon-to-be wife Nikki, and she encouraged me to try and show my artwork again. I submitted my artwork to a gallery called the Deep Ellum Center for the Arts. They offered me a dual show with another artist. After that I started showing regularly at various galleries.

Thats the artistic side of me in a nutshell. You can always see more of my work on my website. I will be posting a lot of my past work on this blog so I can go more in depth about the paintings, the stories behind the paintings, post images of sketches before the paintings were created, and so on.