Christopher Noxon: Feeling Pictures

"Aspen Grove," acrylic on canvas.

I’ve only been making art seriously for about five years, so I’m no expert and hesitate making any grand generalizations about capital-A Art, but one thing I’ve recently come to believe: art has got to change to stay alive.

Meaning, for me anyway: the second I think I’ve settled down and discovered what I do – that’s the moment I feel most compelled to ditch the familiar and try something new. I know it would make the most sense to find a thing that works (people like it! It’s fun to make!) and just DO THAT THING OVER AND OVER, but I dunno - I just can’t. 

All of which is to say I’ve been busy getting ready to open my studio on May 10 to show off a bunch of new work, and while it’s not a huge departure - there’s still a LOT of pink - it does feel like new territory. 

For one thing, I’ve tried capturing scenes from the wild areas around my old stomping

"Vermont Canyon," mixed media on canvas.

grounds in Los Angeles (my first solo show in LA opens on May 17 at Oxford House Projects). You can see landmarks like the LA Observatory and the famed Wishing Tree above Lake Hollywood, but other pieces are way less literal - there are big floating spirits, carved-out gaps and areas of wonky abstraction.

A lot of the new pictures were made on two adjoining canvases and then mounted in a box-like floating frame, which I did to draw attention to the surface of the pictures, since I’m playing a lot more with texture and varnish and palette knives, trying to add interest and value to pictures-as-objects. 

The hope is that this new batch of work FEELS good - I’m trying to make pictures that capture and contain a feeling. It’s the feeling I get being in a wild place with mountains and water and a big sky streaked with clouds. It’s a feeling of awe and humility, of togetherness and singularity, of personal insignificance and limitless possibility.

I don’t make conceptual art. I make feeling pictures.