Today we’d like to introduce you to Christopher Noxon.
Hi Christopher, so excited to have you with us today. What can you tell us about your story?
I began painting seriously in 2020 after raising kids and working as a journalist and illustrator in Los Angeles. I take inspiration from the colors and energies around Ojai and the surrounding wilderness. My aim is to capture the energy and spirit of place, the simultaneous feeling of awe and humility, of togetherness and singularity, of personal insignificance and limitless possibility.
I’m a member of the Ojai Studio Artists and had work acquired by the Ojai Valley Museum. In the past year, I’ve had an exhibition at Sullivan Goss Gallery in Santa Barbara and paintings shown at the Santa Paula Art Museum and Gallery 825 in Los Angeles and had my work featured in the LA Weekly, which described my work as “riotously chromatic, time- and space-bending canvases seeking the energy of the landscape’s wild places, infused with the pluripotentiality of the mind’s eye.”
I’m sure you wouldn’t say it’s been obstacle free, but so far would you say the journey have been a fairly smooth road?
I began painting during a profoundly difficult period – I was wrecked from the end of a marriage and the death of my eldest son. Making art was something to do besides feeling miserable. While I had no formal training, I took inspiration and instruction from my late grandmother Betty Lane. I had recently inherited more than 300 of her paintings and drawings, and they guided me in this new pursuit. One series includes paired portraits, Betty’s subjects from the 60s and 70s set beside my recent pictures of friends and neighbors. In other paintings, I attempt to depict the otherworldly spirt of the landscape around me in the same way Betty approached the features of rural Canada and coastal Massachusetts.
Sullivan Goss Gallery in Santa Barbara is currently showing 20 paintings from Betty Lane alongside a number of large recent pieces of mine. These four-by-three foot canvases use local locations including Meditation Mount, the Ventura River Preserve and Horn Canyon as jumping-off points for abstracted explorations of the seen and unseen. Looking at our work together, it’s my hope you can trace generational connections, shared ways of seeing and a persistent sense of life all around us.
Appreciate you sharing that. What else should we know about what you do?
In my past life, I wrote for publications including the New Yorker, the Atlantic and the New York Times. I wrote and illustrated the book Good Trouble: Lessons from the Civil Rights Playbook, the novel Plus One and the nonfiction Rejuvenile: Kickball, Cartoons Cupcakes and the Reinvention of the American Grown-Up.
When I started, I was mostly doing paintings of crowds, scenes of protest marches similar to the illustrations in my book “Good Trouble.” In those pictures of bodies forming big abstract patterns, I was trying to capture the feeling of being in a group gathered around a higher purpose. I was also, it only occurred to me after many months and many paintings, using art to fill a more personal need (isn’t that always the case?). It was the height of the pandemic and like so many of us, I felt isolated and lonely and terrified at the state of the world. I craved crowds.
At a certain point, I switched from people to places. I can tell you precisely when that happened – it was a bright early summer morning and I was sitting in my studio, looking out the barn doors at an enormous outcropping of pricky pear cactus. In a flash, heads and bodies appeared in the shapes, a whole gathering right outside my door.
I made a so-so painting of those cacti and was off to the races, chasing scenes and panoramas and shapes and colors from walks and hikes and travels around Ojai and the surrounding wilderness. The work has gone from flat and graphic to layered and scratchy and abstractly patterned. I try to let the pictures tell me what they want and get out of the way. I believe it: the vortex is real. There’s an energy and spirit in this place, as tangible and powerful as the feeling you get amid crowds of people raising their voices together. It’s a simultaneous feeling of awe and humility, of togetherness and singularity, of personal insignificance and limitless possibility. The landscape contains it all.
Do you have recommendations for books, apps, blogs, etc?
I’ve always got something playing in the studio. If I’m doing something that requires a lot of concentration, I’ll play instrumental, unobtrusive sounds – I love the pianist H Hunt, LA-based composer Emile Mosseri and of course Brian Eno. Otherwise, it’s usually a playlist of my go-to indie-folkie favorites: Big Thief, Pinegrove, Wilco, Yo La Tengo, Bon Iver. Also love the podcast “Bandsplain” – it’s a deep dive on one band’s full discography. The Kate Bush episode is amazing, plus they did like SEVEN HOURS on PJ Harvey.
Pricing:
- Original artworks range in price from $400-$5000 depending on size and medium.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.christophernoxonart.com
- Instagram: @noxonpics
Image Credits
Photos by Christopher Noxon
