Paul Noble

Paul Noble is an English painter, draughtsman and installation artist. After completing his degree in Fine Art at Humberside College of Higher Education in 1986, he moved to London, where he was a founding member of the artist-run gallery City Racing. At City Racing he held his first exhibitions, which consisted mostly of small narrative paintings and drawings suggesting infantile dream-like worlds. Later he made whole installations based on a single narrative. The game was accompanied by comic-strip drawings that depicted the unemployed characters leading an aimless existence. Despite the bleakness of his themes, Noble's work is rich in visual delight. Parodying the intense fantastical doodling of teenagers, his paintings, drawings and installations, in which he has invented whole new worlds, marked out a particular territory somewhere between despair and hilarity.

Noble further developed the theme of social hopelessness through the creation of a unique metaphorical urbanscape. Nobson(1998; exh. London, Chisenhale Gal., 1998) is presented as a vision of a utopian city rendered in very large and highly detailed graphite drawings. Upon closer inspection, the dystopian nature of this imaginary city, its institutions such as the Nobspital, and its dysfunctional occupants becomes apparent. Continuing the Nobson theme, Nobson Newtown (1998; exh. New York, Gorney, Bravin & Lee, 2000) depicts a cityscape in which the rows of buildings spell out the town's name in an orthogonally projected typeface. Noble described the work as ‘Town planning as self-portraiture', which helps explain the apparent lack of inhabitants, since the only inhabitant is the artist himself.

Here is an excerpt from an interview posted in The Guardian, 2009.
http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2009/sep/19/paul-noble-how-he-draws

Image: detail from Ye Olde Ruin, 2003-4, pencil on paper, 426 x 732cm. Courtesy of Paul Noble, Maureen Paley, London and Gagosian Gallery, New York

I use the devices of technical drawing. These devices help shine the sharpest light on the things I depict. I am against hierarchies and perspective. I arrange the objects of my drawings on a spatial plane using cavalier projection. The origins of this projection lay in military cartography - fore, mid and background are got rid of and everything depicted is equally close and far. The viewer becomes the architect and the drawing, an architectural plan. He or she is no longer earthbound but hovers like an angel over the described scene, taking in the entire design.

I was raised on the north-east coast of England, and this has conditioned my aesthetic. I think like the flat, grey skies of wintery Whitley Bay - tonally. I use very hard pencils, very rarely softer than 4H. Sometimes the pencils are so hard it seems they would rather scratch a hole in the paper than give up their pale graphite.

• Paul Noble was born in Northumberland in 1963. He is represented by Gagosian