Marshall Noice at Telluride's Lustre Gallery on Sunday, July 3

02 Jul Marshall Noice at Telluride's Lustre Gallery on Sunday, July 3

Getting a jump on Telluride Art's upcoming First Thursday Art Walk, July 7, and at the tail end of the Sheridan Arts Foundation's Telluride Plein Air, an outdoor art show featuring American Impressionists that ends at 4 p.m. July 3, Lustre Gallery presents the work of Marshall Noice. The artist's reception is Sunday, July 3, 4 – 6 p.m., 171 South Pine Street, a great excuse for those who can't get enough light in their lives to continue to wave their plein air banner high.

Marshall Noice never met a sky or a tree he did not like. For 36 years, the artist has been obsessed by landscapes. What we see in his work resembles the outside world the artist depicts much in the way a guitar case resembles a guitar: Noice is not painting a grove of trees for instance. He is depicting his emotional response to a grove of trees, which makes him an Expressionist for those who require an "ist" or an "ism." Noice is an Expressionist with Impressionistic flourishes and a Fauve sense of color.

  “I capture a sense of place, but it’s my sense, my color. It’s delicate, because color is a strange animal. I work to create tone and value in an expressive way that resonates with me. At times, my color is almost outrageous – on the edge of being out of control.”

Since retiring as a photographer, Noice has earned a national following as a contemporary Expressionist artist with work in galleries in Santa Fe, Jackson Hole, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, and other hot spots such as Telluride.

Noice, who is a self-taught painter, has literally spent tens of thousands of hours perfecting his style in oils, working in his Kalispell, Montana studio five days a week when he is not on the road. Among his influences he lists Impressionist Pierre Bonnard, who made dreamy, abstracted landscapes of everyday life, and Abstract Expressionist Marc Rothko, who attempted to capture the spiritual resonance of a landscape in his color fields.

“Rothko had created edges that heightened the sense of luminosity. I believe he understood the use of light better than anyone else. Light just emanates from his paintings.”

For the slightly off-key way he deals with complementary colors to add dynamic tension to his work, Noice credits Joe Abbrescia. But perhaps Noice's greatest influence was Ansel Adams:

 “From him I gained the ability to see light.”

Noice works on a dozen or more images at a time, allowing layers to before adding the next up to 1- to 15 applications of paint for texture and pop. It can be weeks, even years, before the artist declares a work done.