New York, NY — The exhibition Novel Lineage signaled a turning point in Lisa Noble’s approach to painting. In this recent series of ink and oil works on canvas, Noble rekindles her first love for drawing by reinforcing the importance of line as the framework and foundation of her motivations behind art making. Noble continues to explore the self-portrait as a means to communicate ideas about her identity and personal history.

Noble looks to painters such as Henri Matisse (French, 1869–1954) to inform her shift in style and process. She works by a set of tenets to explore her natural tendencies toward insistent flatness, tilted perspective, self-referential imagery and an increasingly transitional approach to subject matter. Pattern frequently plays an important role in Noble’s compositions of interiors and abstracted environments. Through the reductive process of sgraffito, a decorative and gendered sensibility is brought to her paintings.

Noble’s observation of antiquity is an important aspect of her process. She holds in high regard those objects—made by artists and makers who lived before her—as they reside static and eternal in museums and other sites. A trip to Oaxaca and Mexico City in February 2023, gave Noble the opportunity to experience up close the objects of Mesoamerican cultures. Upon returning to the studio, further contemplation and sketching of these sculpted forms and symbolic patterns revealed to Noble a rhythmic ritual of mark making. With humble, hand-drawn lines, she then worked to imbue her paintings with a similar underlying harmony.