Roy Noakes
Encyclopedia
Roy Noakes British Sculptor June 10, 1936 - February 9, 2002
All of the young British sculptors who emerged in the 1950s had to engage with the towering international reputation of Henry Moore
, and with the associated fallacy that direct carving was congruent with modernity
. But at least the weight of Moore’s eminence was a crucial factor in provoking a reaction; Roy Noakes embarked on a fascinating and important journey in a very different direction.
Noakes dedicated his life to evolving an alternative sculptural
language, one concerned with transience and lightness, to conveying fleeting appearances and gestures with economy of means - pared down, that is, in the sense of needing to eliminate everything that was extraneous to the inner energy of his forms. He worked outside the mainstream or avant-garde cultural orthodoxies of his time, neither a brutalist, a conceptualist
, nor involved with smooth or shiny surfaces that were barriers to expressing the dynamic potential of his materials.
Noakes’s surfaces were active, not static. He aimed to breathe life into clay or bronze, to break down the distance between sculpture and the human form it signified, almost as though blood was coursing through its veins. In more than forty years of widely varied work, there is a common thread in that it all looks alive - spontaneous. However great was his struggle with intransigent substances, the viewer is not conscious of it.
The art world was in a rush in the 1960s, and with the privileging of ‘the new’. Innovations were confidently hyped that have proved alarmingly transient, the great ideas depressingly hollow. Noakes was too serious about exploring his ideas (as well as temperamentally indisposed) to court popularity. Fortunately, the core of his work remains to ensure that the art-historical record can now be put straight.
. His achievement, driven by a refusal to be constrained by technique or bound by what he had learned, was based on his consummate skills as a craftsman.
He was born in Stepney
in 1936, and although as a dyslexic he was unresponsive to formal education in the local secondary school, he was encouraged to draw by his father (who died when Roy was twelve). He was, fortuitously, apprenticed aged fifteen to the monumental masons, Anselm Odling, and ‘learned to carve roses and angels’. He also attended evening drawing classes at the City & Guilds of London Institute
, Kennington
, where among the teachers was the sculptor Bernard Sindall, RA, who, crucially, introduced him to the work of Giacomo Manzu
and Medardo Rosso
. In 1962 Noakes was awarded a Beckwith Scholarship by the Fishmonger’s Company
and travelled to Italy. If his work sometimes invites comparisons with the unfinished sculptures of Michelangelo
and late Rodin
, Manzu’s reliefs and Rosso’s emotive impressionism were his chief inspirations.
Noakes changed his indentures to Gerald Giudici, a master carver who executed large-scale public sculptures by Sir Charles Wheeler, Gilbert Ledward
and James Woodford
; at the end of a long tradition of figurative sculpture, these free-standing monuments and architectural reliefs represented for the ‘modernist’ Patrick Heron
, ‘spurious sentiment and meaningless skill’. Noakes might have agreed, but the path he took in the 1960s related neither to the ‘abstraction’ of Anthony Caro
, Phillip King or William Tucker
, nor to the vestigial figurative tradition represented by John Davis
or the mechanistics of George Fullard and Eduardo Paolozzi
.
After National Service in the Middle East he returned full time to study at
Kennington (1958–62), making brilliantly animated figures in a burst of creativity pent up during his enforced two-year absence. Subsequently his career can be seen in terms of evolving a personal expressive language through modelling. Even in the most ostensibly passive of his late high-reliefs, in which the female figures have an almost fin-de-siecle dolorousness, there is energy and a snap-shot immediacy.
In a gesture that was typical of the man and his commitment to sculpture Noakes made, latterly, just one formal portrait, to show he could carve and to get it out of his system; this was a bust of Sir Anthony Eden (1996) of which there are versions in the Houses of Parliament and the Foreign Office. (The commissioned portraits of Instone Bloomfield and Alan Rawsthorne
(1967, National Portrait Gallery http://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/person.php?search=sa&sText=noakes&LinkID=mp07953&role=art) capture their sitters’ spirits but make no concessions to traditional modelling). He continued to offer us the intangible and the elusive made forcefully but elegantly plastic.
All of the young British sculptors who emerged in the 1950s had to engage with the towering international reputation of Henry Moore
Henry Moore
Henry Spencer Moore OM CH FBA was an English sculptor and artist. He was best known for his semi-abstract monumental bronze sculptures which are located around the world as public works of art....
, and with the associated fallacy that direct carving was congruent with modernity
Modernity
Modernity typically refers to a post-traditional, post-medieval historical period, one marked by the move from feudalism toward capitalism, industrialization, secularization, rationalization, the nation-state and its constituent institutions and forms of surveillance...
. But at least the weight of Moore’s eminence was a crucial factor in provoking a reaction; Roy Noakes embarked on a fascinating and important journey in a very different direction.
Noakes dedicated his life to evolving an alternative sculptural
Sculpture
Sculpture is three-dimensional artwork created by shaping or combining hard materials—typically stone such as marble—or metal, glass, or wood. Softer materials can also be used, such as clay, textiles, plastics, polymers and softer metals...
language, one concerned with transience and lightness, to conveying fleeting appearances and gestures with economy of means - pared down, that is, in the sense of needing to eliminate everything that was extraneous to the inner energy of his forms. He worked outside the mainstream or avant-garde cultural orthodoxies of his time, neither a brutalist, a conceptualist
Conceptual art
Conceptual art is art in which the concept or idea involved in the work take precedence over traditional aesthetic and material concerns. Many of the works, sometimes called installations, of the artist Sol LeWitt may be constructed by anyone simply by following a set of written instructions...
, nor involved with smooth or shiny surfaces that were barriers to expressing the dynamic potential of his materials.
Noakes’s surfaces were active, not static. He aimed to breathe life into clay or bronze, to break down the distance between sculpture and the human form it signified, almost as though blood was coursing through its veins. In more than forty years of widely varied work, there is a common thread in that it all looks alive - spontaneous. However great was his struggle with intransigent substances, the viewer is not conscious of it.
The art world was in a rush in the 1960s, and with the privileging of ‘the new’. Innovations were confidently hyped that have proved alarmingly transient, the great ideas depressingly hollow. Noakes was too serious about exploring his ideas (as well as temperamentally indisposed) to court popularity. Fortunately, the core of his work remains to ensure that the art-historical record can now be put straight.
Career
Roy Noakes became a modeller by what was paradoxically the most efficient route - through his training as a carverStone carving
Stone carving is an ancient activity where pieces of rough natural stone are shaped by the controlled removal of stone. Owing to the permanence of the material, evidence can be found that even the earliest societies indulged in some form of stone work....
. His achievement, driven by a refusal to be constrained by technique or bound by what he had learned, was based on his consummate skills as a craftsman.
He was born in Stepney
Stepney
Stepney is a district of the London Borough of Tower Hamlets in London's East End that grew out of a medieval village around St Dunstan's church and the 15th century ribbon development of Mile End Road...
in 1936, and although as a dyslexic he was unresponsive to formal education in the local secondary school, he was encouraged to draw by his father (who died when Roy was twelve). He was, fortuitously, apprenticed aged fifteen to the monumental masons, Anselm Odling, and ‘learned to carve roses and angels’. He also attended evening drawing classes at the City & Guilds of London Institute
City and Guilds of London Art School
The City and Guilds of London Art School is an art college in London, England, United Kingdom. It is one of the country's longest established art colleges, and offers courses ranging from Foundation, through B.A. degree, Postgraduate Diploma and M.A...
, Kennington
Kennington
Kennington is a district of South London, England, mainly within the London Borough of Lambeth, although part of the area is within the London Borough of Southwark....
, where among the teachers was the sculptor Bernard Sindall, RA, who, crucially, introduced him to the work of Giacomo Manzu
Giacomo Manzù
Giacomo Manzù, pseudonym of Giacomo Manzoni , was an Italian sculptor, communist, and Roman Catholic.-Biography:...
and Medardo Rosso
Medardo Rosso
Medardo Rosso was an Italian sculptor. He is thought to have developed the Post Impressionism style in sculpture along with Auguste Rodin....
. In 1962 Noakes was awarded a Beckwith Scholarship by the Fishmonger’s Company
Worshipful Company of Fishmongers
The Worshipful Company of Fishmongers is one of the 108 Livery Companies of the City of London, being a guild of the sellers of fish and seafood in the City...
and travelled to Italy. If his work sometimes invites comparisons with the unfinished sculptures of Michelangelo
Michelangelo
Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni , commonly known as Michelangelo, was an Italian Renaissance painter, sculptor, architect, poet, and engineer who exerted an unparalleled influence on the development of Western art...
and late Rodin
Rodin
- People :* Auguste Rodin , French sculptor, for whom is named:** The Musée Rodin in Paris, France** The Rodin Museum in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA** The Rodin Gallery in Seoul, South Korea** Rodin , a crater on the Moon...
, Manzu’s reliefs and Rosso’s emotive impressionism were his chief inspirations.
Noakes changed his indentures to Gerald Giudici, a master carver who executed large-scale public sculptures by Sir Charles Wheeler, Gilbert Ledward
Gilbert Ledward
Gilbert Ledward RA , was an English sculptor.He won the Prix de Rome for sculpture in 1913, and in World War I served in the Royal Garrison Artillery and later as a war artist. He was professor of sculpture at the Royal College of Art and in 1937 was elected a Royal Academician...
and James Woodford
James Woodford
James Woodford was an English sculptor-Life:Woodford was born in Nottingham in 1893. His father was a lace designer. Woodford started studying at the Nottingham School of Art, but his studies were curtailed when he enlisted during the First World War. After the war, he continued his training at...
; at the end of a long tradition of figurative sculpture, these free-standing monuments and architectural reliefs represented for the ‘modernist’ Patrick Heron
Patrick Heron
Patrick Heron , was an English painter, writer and designer, based in St. Ives, Cornwall.- Early life :...
, ‘spurious sentiment and meaningless skill’. Noakes might have agreed, but the path he took in the 1960s related neither to the ‘abstraction’ of Anthony Caro
Anthony Caro
Sir Anthony Alfred Caro, OM, CBE is an English abstract sculptor whose work is characterised by assemblages of metal using 'found' industrial objects.-Background and early life:...
, Phillip King or William Tucker
William G. Tucker
William G. Tucker is a modernist British sculptor and modern art scholar. He was born to English parents in Cairo, Egypt in 1935. In 1937, his family returned to England, where Tucker was raised. He attended the University of Oxford from 1955-1958...
, nor to the vestigial figurative tradition represented by John Davis
John Davis (sculptor)
John Davis was an Australian sculptor and pioneer of Environmental art.-Early life:He studied at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, Caulfield institute of technology and Melbourne Teachers College before becoming a lecturer at Prahran College of Advanced Education.-Work:An Australian...
or the mechanistics of George Fullard and Eduardo Paolozzi
Eduardo Paolozzi
Sir Eduardo Luigi Paolozzi, KBE, RA , was a Scottish sculptor and artist. He was a major figure in the international art sphere, while, working on his own interpretation and vision of the world. Paolozzi investigated how we can fit into the modern world to resemble our fragmented civilization...
.
After National Service in the Middle East he returned full time to study at
Kennington (1958–62), making brilliantly animated figures in a burst of creativity pent up during his enforced two-year absence. Subsequently his career can be seen in terms of evolving a personal expressive language through modelling. Even in the most ostensibly passive of his late high-reliefs, in which the female figures have an almost fin-de-siecle dolorousness, there is energy and a snap-shot immediacy.
In a gesture that was typical of the man and his commitment to sculpture Noakes made, latterly, just one formal portrait, to show he could carve and to get it out of his system; this was a bust of Sir Anthony Eden (1996) of which there are versions in the Houses of Parliament and the Foreign Office. (The commissioned portraits of Instone Bloomfield and Alan Rawsthorne
Alan Rawsthorne
Alan Rawsthorne was a British composer. He was born in Haslingden, Lancashire, and is buried in Thaxted churchyard in Essex.-Career:...
(1967, National Portrait Gallery http://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/person.php?search=sa&sText=noakes&LinkID=mp07953&role=art) capture their sitters’ spirits but make no concessions to traditional modelling). He continued to offer us the intangible and the elusive made forcefully but elegantly plastic.
Brief Bibliography
- Jack LindsayJack LindsayRobert Leeson Jack Lindsay was an Australian-born writer, who from 1926 lived in the United Kingdom, initially in Essex. He was born in Melbourne, but spent his formative years in Brisbane...
Roy Noakes, The Archer Gallery 1975 - David Thomson Roy Noakes Sculpture, October Gallery, 1989
- Martin Harrison ‘Roy Noakes’ (2003) Roy Noakes Sculpture and Paper Works, Arts Council, 2009
Work in
- National Portrait Gallery http://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/person.php?search=sa&sText=noakes&LinkID=mp07953&role=art
- Arts Council England
- Mercer Gallery Harrogate
- Royal Northern College of Music
- The House of Commons
- The Foreign Office
- Private collections
- Design Androcles and the LionAndrocles and the Lion (play)Androcles and the Lion is a 1912 play written by George Bernard Shaw.Androcles and the Lion is Shaw's retelling of the tale of Androcles, a slave who is saved by the requited mercy of a lion. In the play, Shaw portrays Androcles to be one of the many Christians being led to the Colosseum for torture...
Mermaid Theatre, Oct. 3rd. 1961, directed Frank Dunlop
Links
- Roy Noakes Bursary Prize, selected by Royal British Society of SculptorsRoyal British Society of SculptorsThe Royal British Society of Sculptors is a registered charity whose aims are to promote and support sculpture. It has a worldwide membership....
http://www.rbs.org.uk/ - North Yorkshire News http://www.northyorkshirenews.com/leisure/Renowned-sculptor39s-work-given-Pateley.5137177.jp
- National Portrait Gallery http://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/person.php?search=sa&sText=noakes&LinkID=mp07953&role=art
- Some works can be viewed at http://www.paulharrisphotography.com/index.php?option=com_rsgallery2&gid=4&tg=2