Noel White
Noel White is a painter in oil and watercolour, a glass engraver and print-maker. Noel’s work is mainly pastoral in theme. In his East Sussex garden a grove of majestic oak trees border woodland. The Sacred Wood is the landscape of this garden and of the imagination. In addition to his pastoral images, he has a devotion to colour. In his Colour Compositions the characteristics of colour are energies capable of complex organisation.
Born in 1939, Noel White trained at Weston-super-Mare School of Art under Warren Storey, the West-of-England College of Art and Aarhus University, Denmark. In his early twenties, he met the painter and poet David Jones and was profoundly moved by his ideas. It was his meetings with the Danish artist Maar Julius Lange in the late 1960s that finally united him with the task of painting for life. He has exhibited widely in the UK, and in Bulgaria, Denmark, Germany, Russia and Israel and his commissions include two glass engraved windows for St Ninian’s Episcopal Church in Edinburgh completed in 2000.
In 2005 a major exhibition of his work entitled Mary and the Creation was held at St Mary’s Episcopal Cathedral Edinburgh during the Edinburgh Festival from which come the following comments:
“Asked to sum up the meaning of Noel’s art, I would choose the word ‘iconic’. He does not seek, it is true, to paint icons in the traditional Byzantine or medieval Russian style. Yet the definition given by St Stephen the New, martyr in the eighth-century Iconoclast controversy – ‘The icon is a door’ – exactly sums up the significance of Noel’s work. His pictures are an opened door, a path of initiation. Through them we may pass, if we wish, into the realm of the Spirit, into a region of vision and wonder.” The Most Revd Kallistos Ware, Metropolitan of Diokleia, in his introduction to Mary and the Creation (Fellowship of St Alban and St Sergius, 2005) p.5.
“This magnificent exhibition is an exceptional cri de coeur, inviting the viewers to express their own spiritual identity…[Noel White’s] deep compassion and understanding of a society that has for the most part rejected the Christian truth; his technical virtuosity, his love of paint and colour, and the mark-making that is the product of a skillful print-maker.” Richard Demarco in opening remarks, quoted by Alison M. Robertson in Art and Christianity no. 45 (2006) p.18-19.
“These paintings reveal secrets the longer one contemplates them. In Noel’s paintings there is a sense of shifting artistic reality, achieving almost unlimited chromatic variation, with the result of wonderful colour. The world of his pictures is in a state of flux: everything is coming to be. We are attending Creation.” Artist Joy Griffiths in Mary and the Creation, ibid. p.11.