Tony Noble
Into the Valley
Oil on panel
27cm x 150cm
Born 1st June, 1956 in Batley, West Yorkshire.
1975-79 studied Fine Art Painting at Loughborough College of Art.
1984-85 studied Primary Education at Leeds University.
1985-2008 worked as full-time primary school teacher.
1998 whilst still teaching, following a 14 year interval from painting, resumed work in a studio in Batley.
2008 gave up teaching to focus full-time on painting.
Since 2008 I have exhibited widely. Exhibitions include Royal Academy Summer Exhibition(x3), BP Portrait Award Exhibition(x5), John Moores Painting Prize Exhibition, New Light Exhibition(x4), ING Discerning Eye Exhibition(x4), Lynn Painter Stainers Prize Exhibition(x2), The Leeds Artists Show 2023.
Much of my work over the past 25 years has been focussed in the urban landscape around my home town of Batley, West Yorkshire. Many of the locations I have used are places passed on the way from home to my studio in Redbrick Mill, Batley Carr, where I have been based for the past 15 years. I love the aesthetics of Victorian industrial and civic architecture and enjoy seeing how it has been sometimes neglected, sometimes transformed and adapted over time. I’m also very interested in the more ‘ordinary’, domestic architecture and how it sits in the landscape, reflecting aspects of the lives of the people who live or have lived in and amongst it. I like to question locations – Why does it look the way it does? What is its purpose? What is its potential? What would the people who live and work around it say about it? As I grow older, I think my work is becoming more politically motivated, concerned with issues of conservation, heritage, fairness and responsibility in society, the distribution of wealth, ownership and power.
I also paint other subjects, and since the lockdown of 2020 have been working on a series of bird paintings. I’m a keen walker and bird watcher, and during lockdown, when I couldn’t access my studio and had to work at home, I began to catalogue the lovely birds seen on my daily walks. The series is an on-going project, currently consisting of approaching 50 paintings.
