Paul Noble: Art on the Underground

March 18, 2009 by: Emma Gritt

Image courtesy of Maureen Paley, London

Paul Noble produces pencil drawings which not only take months to complete, but are so huge that he himself never sees a completed drawing until the many individual sheets of paper on which he’s worked are pinned together on the gallery wall. Through his graphite and paint pieces, he toys with ideas of hopelessness and social malfunction whilst keeping a playful, almost puerile tone, and simultaneously explores notions of urban culture encroaching upon rural life and traditions. His 2004 solo show at the Whitechapel Gallery saw the unveiling of Nobson Newtown, a monumental piece of work which he worked upon for eight years. No people are depicted in the town, which the artist described as an “exercise in self-portraiture via town planning”.

At first glance, the huge drawings depicted an aerial view of the fictional town, but on further inspection the buildings were revealed as being three-dimensional letters, spelling words in the artist’s very own Nobfont, a ‘special font based on the forms of classic modernist architecture’. Frieze Magazine described the architecture of this intricate and fantastical – yet still very inherently English – world as being ‘depicted in a rigidly isometric manner within the landscapes, emphasising a contrast between the organic and inorganic’. A book of Nobson Newtown is available to buy.

With these ties to complicatedness and Britishness, it seems that he is the perfect artist to design the latest Pocket Tube Map cover. His selected artwork, ‘Troubadour Carrying a Cytiole’, is a pencil drawing of a character from a much larger work that is currently under development. It indirectly refers to the Tube system itself as an architectural environment of a fantastical and maze-like nature as it draws parallels between the lives of the troubadours who, in the Middle Ages, would travel from court to court to perform poetry and song and the experience of Tube customers who make their journeys across the city each day.

According to Transport for London’s website, “Since 2000, Art on the Underground has been working with artists to produce and present new artworks to enhance and enrich the journeys of millions on the Tube every day.” Well, my journey is rarely enriched by the scenery I come in to contact with as it’s usually the back of someone’s head during that special time of day known as ‘rush hour’. Too bad that real-life troubadours do not use London Underground, lutes and cytioles would certainly make a more pleasant commuting soundtrack than coughing and other people’s iPods.
 

Image courtesy the artist/London Underground