Darfur

This painting depicts a woman from Darfur, beaten and clinging onto life, looking back at the viewer and wondering why no one is helping her.  Why is she being ignored by the rest of the world? The women and girls in this region are receiving the worst types of violence committed especially against them. This is the image of someone that has hit bottom and is sitting there waiting. However you can see the strength in her eyes, a dim light that is taking refuge in the depths of her pupils, a light that will soon well up and shine bright again.

The image of this painting came to me all at once, in an instant. The surface of the canvas is rough, beaten and worn as is the subject.  To me it’s a painting that is constantly challenging the viewer to solve the answer to an unanswerable question - Why?  Why the violence, the rape, the murder, why against us? Against me? Why is more not being done to help the victims?

This solitary symbol of the victims of Darfur will never relinquish her question of "why". Her gaze digs its questioning stare deep into the viewer looking for answers as do roots dig into dry soil searching for water.

Freud's Subconscious

Sigmund Freud, feeding the materialization of his subconscious (a ring-tailed lemur) a cashew. His own creation and discovery, the subconscious, now a living entity of its own, resting upon his shoulders, needing attention and further nourishment (especially cashews)!

Just a fun painting about the creation of new fundamental ideas and how we incorporate them into our framework of reality. 

Why a lemur? Something Id really like to do one day is to feed wild lemurs in Madagascar.

Midnight Storm Rolling Into Venice

Midnight Storm Rolling Into Venice is an architectural piece depicting the city of Venice at midnight just as a storm is blowing in from the Adriatic Sea.

All the people are inside their homes, the streets are deserted; the winged lion of St Marks is cleaning himself (now that he doesn’t have to sit still pretending to be a statue).  A wooden chair waits the viewer in the lower left side of the canvas, inviting the viewer to have a seat as their eyes wonder through the city streets and breathe in the cool, salty air just before the storm

The Way the Light Dances in Istanbul

I have seen by traveling to different countries that the light seems to have a different hue, a nature all its own in relationship to the geographical elements, the plants, the stones, the dirt and animals (I include people under the animal description). Light seems to have its own unique characteristics based on the angle its hitting the earth, the longitude and latitude you’re standing on at the moment.  This is the light vibrating and dancing through the ancient and modern streets of Istanbul, broken up into cross sections of time, a split second of sensation and time tiled like slides for a microscope.

The Griffin and the Cello

This piece is title "The Griffin and the Cello". It shows a griffin (with the anthropomorphic addition of a woman’s head, arm and breast) playing a cello on a street corner. All the people in the street have umbrellas, and you can see from the water rushing down the street drain that there is a break in a rain storm. The griffin is resting her foot on a flower of life ball similar to the way Chinese guardian lions do.

The cello to me is a very sexual instrument when the musician is a female.  The female musician wraps her legs around the large wooden vibrating instrument, playing and creating notes, a communication takes place between the musician and the instrument that is both intimate and sensual. The music that is made floats through the air, calling nature to rain more, to produce more water to nourish the earth. The figure in back watches the street musician playing in admiration.

The female griffin musician playing the cello represents a woman creating life, the intimate relationship between mother and baby in utero. The creation of life is pure, natural, animalistic, and beyond our comprehension.  It is the nexus between our dimension and another, the one we all came from before this one.

I look in on admiration at my wife as she creates life. This painting was finished the day we found out we are having another baby. 

Per Chance To Dream Reception Photos

Per Chance To Dream Reception at Dahlia Woods

Id like to invite anyone reading this post who will be in Dallas On January 16th out to an art reception Ill be having at Dahlia Woods Gallery called "Per Chance To Dream - The Dream Paintings of Skip Noah".

I will have 13 paintings at the show, most of them I haven't shown to anyone. The attire is very casual, its free, and should be lots of fun. Here is the information:

Gallery Name: Dahlia Woods Gallery
Address: 600 Cantegral Street in Dallas (bordering Deep Ellum)
When: Friday, January 16th from 6:00 to 8:30 pm

Jasmine Tea With Okapi

This piece titled Jasmine Tea With Okapi is a fun story showing an Okapi wondering into a tea house at night, and a geisha serving him some Jasmine tea. The okapi seems smitten with the geisha serving him, though the geisha seem a bit unsure.  He has probably been to this tea house before, most likely has a crush on this particular geisha.  She knows this and seems a little uneasy that we have wondered in and are viewing the unorthodox relationship between the two. 

Yellow butterflies are flying in through the window and partaking in the spilt tea on the table and gathering nectar from the wild cherry blossoms in the geisha's hair.  This idea of the yellow butterflies is influenced from Gabriel Garcia Marquez's book 100 Years of Solitude. 

The hanging lamp forms an eye, drowsily staring back at the viewer. The situation created by this scenario, combined with the blue-night milieu, nature with her wild cherry blossoms, yellow butterflies and anthropomorphic okapi, gives birth to a conscious; a situational conscious whose eye flows through the hanging lamp and stares back at the viewer with an ancient ambivalence.

The reason I chose an okapi for this piece is to contrast the natural markings of the okapi with the unnatural ornamentations of the geisha (and other women who find it necessary to over decorate themselves).  

San Francisco Under a Marigold Sky

This is one of the new paintings I recently finished. It shows a person (me) laying in the foreground holding a thread that winds its way through the hills of San Francisco. The thread represents where I have physically been, the time and experience of walking through the city condensed into a material object. 

When we visit or live in a city, the more we explore it the more we collect memories and associations with that bit of geography, the wider our definition of a place becomes. We also see places without physically standing on them (the water in the bay, the sky, the air around us) that we have sensational memories of (sight, smell, temperature). 

I am currently reading Joseph Campbell's The Hero of a Thousand Faces, and he talks of a world navel.  I represent the world navel with the dark somewhat ominous spiral expanding in the center of the city, a nexus between this plane of existence and a dimension beyond our senses. A connection with the experience of exploration and learning  that lies between memory of tangible, physical surroundings and a deeper understanding that lies beyond what we can explain in words, beyond what our senses can comprehend, something that can only be suggested through symbols, presented so each individual can meditate individually through their own framework of the reality that exists beyond our comprehension.