Piet Noest’s paintings are for people who like to take their time. Noest has devoted most of his life to expressing himself through the medium of paint, and he continues to practice what has been termed “slow art.”1 His work is crafted, fastidious and introspective. The viewer’s experience of looking at his work – unlocking the history of choices and decision-making processes played out over the months and years he spends on a painting – allows entry to far-flung landscapes both interior and exterior: those of the mind, spirit and heart, as well as to those of Life and Nature.
A deeply felt connection to the Old Masters informed his early endeavors and has endured to the present. At fourteen, he became “a rebellious son and began his serious interest in art, not in accordance with the plans my father had for me.” He studied painting, drawing and art education in Amsterdam and the Hague from 1957 to 1969. After that, by studying Rembrandt, Vermeer and Titian, he taught himself glazing techniques: the art of using oils to lay down transparent layers of colour relationships to create subtle effects of mood, light and depth. He worked for ten years to perfect his use of oils, publicly exhibiting only his pastel works until he felt he was proficient enough to warrant professional status.
In 1981, while still living in his native Holland, an invitation came to apply for an open position on the faculty at the Queensland College of Art. By the start of the academic year of 1982, Piet and his wife, Hannah, were living in Brisbane and mingling within the Australian art world – at a distance of over fifteen thousand miles from their place of birth. While subsequently living in Townsville, Bribie Island, Melbourne and Margate Beach, he has remained connected to the Old World, returning regularly to visit throughout the Continent and exhibit his work in Holland and Belgium. Having initiated this new Australian life, he went on to become an Australian citizen in 1985, living in this country ever since, and becoming fluent in its customs and sensibilities.
Noest’s life and work can therefore be seen as a site of meeting for two strikingly different cultures with radically divergent experiences of light, space and place. When speaking of his work, he emphasizes that the Dutch landscape has been thoroughly marked by thousands of years of human presence (based in western religion, pastoralism, mercantilism and nationalism), stretching back in time to before the Roman Empire. In contrast, he says, the human hand has rested much more lightly on the Australian continent. And so the open vastness of the light and the energy of the land have offered the painter not only a source of comparison, but also a fresh starting point for inspiration and meaning. Noest’s work is a touchstone for anyone seeking to understand the immigration of twentieth-century European thought to Australia. Or, stated plainly: his paintings and drawings show how a world grown smaller distills new ideas and foments creativity grown from older traditions, brought to another side of the globe.
Such contradictions of time and scale are central to Noest’s inquiry. His work evokes his personal discoveries and the reception of the work by the viewer, as well as the act and quality of seeing. Through his eyes, the image becomes abstracted (to varying extents during different periods of his work), and the canvas support is a platform for a steadfast attack – to find out, to explore, and to ultimately achieve a formal resolution full of meaning, full of duende – one of his favourite words, and a force which the Spanish poet Garcia Lorca described as “the mystery, the roots thrusting into the fertile loam known to all of us, ignored by all of us, but from which we get what is real in art… [and] creative action.”2
When looking at one of Noest’s paintings, the viewer is aware of assuming Noest’s place in front of the canvas, and can feel the artist standing, working, making decisions, pushing the activity as far as he can. The finished painting is both the product of the artist’s journey as well as the viewer’s later, alternative reading. Noest accepts and embraces that “interpretation of my work is different for every person.” And the painting is meant to function, effectively, as an object in the here and now.
In this way, his work carries on the early modernists’ revolutionary engagement of “the beholder’s share,” that is, “the viewer’s relation to an artwork” as fundamental to the completion of a painting’s aesthetic. Today, we take this personal involvement while viewing an artwork as a search for meaning and an act of meditation – a way to find one’s self despite the complexity and stress of everyday life. In fact, it is through Dutch portraiture of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that “external coherence”, that is, (in this case, through eye contact),“the people in the painting…actively engage and are on equal terms with the viewers outside the picture frame,”3 thereby initiating a reciprocity (not a hierarchy) of exchange from within the canvas to the viewer without, and back again.
Yet all of Noest’s work goes on to investigate vision and the underlying emotions attached to the figure/ground relationship in relation to the transience of the material world. In every period of his work, whether the image is more or less abstracted, the painter is building a relationship to what he sees, how he sees it, and how he exists through what he sees, with an emphasis on “seeing” as the same as “feeling” or “experiencing” both – fleeting and mutable activities. He says that, “the objective eye – to see past the surface and discover what is underneath” is his goal. “The human being confronting the landscape comes first – that’s always been the case.”
all about art, the title of this thirty-year retrospective exhibition, underscores Noest’s intention to place his work within the continuum of how art has been made in the past and into today, to strive to remain true to an aesthetic based on his life experience, and to include the viewer in his journey
of discovery.
From 1982 to 1987, Noest produced mainly atmospheric landscapes (along with some still lifes and figurative work). By first photographing and sketching on site and then bringing that imagery into the studio, he began his investigation of Australian light and space. Colour, so important to his work, was local and naturalistic, and chosen for creating mood and spatial play between the physicality of the canvas’ surface and the eye’s need to coalesce marks into a whole, in order to perceive an image. Thus, he began working to find “the moment” – an amalgam of the Expressionist use of paint itself to build emotional texture with the Impressionists’ deconstruction of vision into light and colour.
During the period 1987-1992, he began to strengthen colour saturation and intensity, and to structure his compositions on more formal considerations of line, shape and mark-making. In 1988, he and his wife Hannah moved to Townsville, and explored much of North Queensland, including visits to almost inaccessible caves, such as Blue Snake Cave. In the paintings, layers of paint, while often still glazed, now incorporated opaque and thick passages, and would be scratched through, scumbled, wiped back and worked over. The surface of the paint itself became the landscape, and the “moment” would be more a product of the movement of shape and colour caught within the confines of the canvas’ rectangular borders, and less in the service of recognizable imagery and the creation of a window onto another world.
In 1991, during an extended stay in Ghent, Belgium, Noest began working in his studio to the music of Arnold Schönberg, and became interested in ideas about seriality and variation, as well as responding directly with his hand to the music. From 1992 to 2003, abstraction of imagery became even more planar, even less about depth. Mark-making was more notational, almost schematic. For the work for Chronochromie, a visual response to Ken Farbach’s music, Noest describes his immersion like this:
“After the initial sketch a picture would develop in my mind and on paper or canvas. The music is quite clear in mood and almost descriptive of line and shape. Colour of course is very important, hence, Chronochromie. I listened to the music and let my hand move to it for the first sketch. With watercolours it was quite direct, but not the follow-up. With the oils it was less so. Sometimes I had to listen over and over again to get the hang of the structure. A painting such as 1845 An Irish Elegy took a long time and many layers.”
In 1996, the Noests moved to Melbourne and the artist continued his investigation of abstraction, gradually moving towards the more representational. He began producing his Digital Serial Images (“DSI”) in 2001, using scanned photographs taken years earlier, and later employing a digital camera. On the whole, the DSI became a path to subject matter he would only very rarely paint, and a means of interacting with his subject by way of a different temporal association – not as a narrative, but more directly connected to the ongoing present, as opposed to a painting which he says functions as “a frozen moment in time.” The DSI continue to offer him a way to work conveniently while travelling.
Beginning in 2002, Noest’s life in Melbourne offered the opportunity to experiment with setting the human figure in an urban landscape. The urban crowd paintings universalize the body and face to avoid the particularities of personality. They emphasize the fleeting moment rather than a specific period of time, fashion, or the age and nationality of people. Again, jewel-like colour is of utmost importance to Noest, as is the depiction of light in a flattened, yet naturalistic space. This allows the viewer entrance into Noest’s poetic vision, and extends ambiguity as a basis for reverie.
In 2008, following Hannah’s death and a consequent struggle with severe depression, Noest returned to Queensland to live at Margate Beach and the shores of Moreton Bay. Once again, the natural environment had drawn his attention, and the endlessness of the bay (particularly on those days when Moreton Island is invisible due to weather), and the hinterlands near Maleny and Kilcoy have offered him the open vistas that work well with glazing, atmospheric colour and space. His fascination with the sea is palpable and he says he is “terribly aware” of its vastness. Rather than emulating a photograph, these paintings strive for a spiritual intelligence that surpasses “what we assume is reality.”
Noest’s most recent paintings document the rugged, mountainous landscape of Norway, a setting in which sea, snow, and fog constantly change, contrasting with sheer, immutable rock. Capturing just a moment of the timeless interaction of geology, water and weather is the artist’s goal in these works – and they succeed at pitting the physicality of paint and a rawness of shape and line against the sublime ideal of Nature’s transcendence over human knowledge. The artist confronts the landscape and his materials in much the same manner: as a working medium through which he finds his way.
Carol Schwarzman
February 2013
Redcliffe
