VILLA CARL (REAR VIEW)

© The Artist Courtesy Maureen Paley, Interim Art, London

VILLA CARL (REAR VIEW) 1997

Paul Noble (1963 – )

Details

Dimension
50 X 70 CM
Media
PENCIL ON PAPER
Accession number
P7100

Summary

Paul Noble created a fictional urban landscape in his series of pencil drawings Nobson Newtown. In his metropolis buildings are composed of three-dimensional letters of the alphabet executed in a customised font. Each precisely rendered drawing reveals a new perspective of the townscape, featuring architectural creations constructed from an arrangement of letters, their components spelling out their designated function – villa, slum, light industrial plant, quarry and ‘Paul’s Palace’, the architect’s house. The drawings build up to disclose an elaborately constructed fiction concerning the social infrastructure of this mythical new town, at once playful and sinister. Using the representational devices of architectural elevation drawings, topographic views and fairytale illustration Nobtown represents a nightmarish parody of post-war Utopian town planning.

Landscape, The British Council 2000

 

Glossary

  • Drawing

    The depiction of shapes and forms on a flat surface chiefly by means of lines although colour and shading may also be included. Materials most commonly used are pencil, ink, crayon, charcoal, chalk and pastel, although other materials, including paint, can be used in combination.

  • Landscape

    Landscape is one of the principle genres of Western art. In early paintings the landscape was a backdrop for the composition, but in the late 17th Century the appreciation of nature for its own sake began with the French and Dutch painters (from whom the term derived). Their treatment of the landscape differed: the French tried to evoke the classical landscape of ancient Greece and Rome in a highly stylised and artificial manner; the Dutch tried to paint the surrounding fields, woods and plains in a more realistic way. As a genre, landscape grew increasing popular, and by the 19th Century had moved away from a classical rendition to a more realistic view of the natural world. Two of the greatest British landscape artists of that time were John Constable and JMW Turner, whose works can be seen in the Tate collection (www.tate.org.uk). There can be no doubt that the evolution of landscape painting played a decisive role in the development of Modernism, culminating in the work of the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists . Since then its demise has often been predicted and with the rise of abstraction, landscape painting was thought to have degenerated into an amateur pursuit. However, landscape persisted in some form into high abstraction, and has been a recurrent a theme in most of the significant tendencies of the 20th Century. Now manifest in many media, landscape no longer addresses solely the depiction of topography, but encompasses issues of social, environmental and political concern.