January 30 - February 24, 2007
Main Gallery & Project Room
Opening Reception: Thursday, Feb. 1, 6 - 9 P.M.

Press Release

For his first show at The Painting Center Scott Noel presents interiors and figures painted in four studios in Philadelphia.

The studio has always been a metaphor for the inner life of the painter. These new pictures selected from the past three years explore the visual and psychological resonances between the figure, still life and the cityscape unified in exchanges between the light outdoors and the reflected light that illuminates the studio.

Scott Noel lives and paints in Philadelphia. His work centers on a commitment to perceptual painting and the rigors of registering complex motifs in an alla prima attack. Thomas Eakins pioneered a form of radical empiricism in Philadelphia. On Eakins pervasive legacy the painter and writer Bill Scott wrote in 2001, “In the past fifty years artists like Larry Day, Ben Kamihira and Sidney Goodman created visions that refined and redirected this prevailing stance. Another artist who has contributed to the process is Scott Noel, who at forty-five, is arguably the best figurative painter working here and for many younger artists perhaps the most influential.”

Noel graduated from Washington University in St. Louis, MO and also attended Yale University and the Tyler School of Art. He has been exhibiting regularly in Philadelphia since 1980 and has shown extensively throughout the country. Noel is currently on the faculty at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.