Strathspey art teacher wins a Noble prize
An artist has drawn on inspiration from the surroundings of his new home to land a prestigious double.
Kyle Noble, an art and design teacher at Grantown Grammar School, has just won the RSA Latimer Award in the Royal Scottish Academy’s 195th Annual Exhibition for his work ‘Meditation on the Mountain Pass’.
It is presented for meritorious work by Scottish artists under 35 and follows Mr Noble claiming the same accolade in 2018.
He told the Strathy: “As I am a teacher now, I am just happy that I have artwork to put into these exhibitions - it has been a little while since I had that time. I feel that I am up to speed with everything more.
“I was not expecting this award win at all. To a certain degree I submitted not even expecting to get into the exhibition.
“In the past I have been something in and it has not been selected.
“But the RSA has been really good to me and I have won the Latimer Award before - in 2018 - which is really great.
“The RSA are really good at supporting artists who are still trying to gain a footing in the gallery world. I have won a few things from them in the past including the William Littlejohn Award in 2014 and I was awarded £2000 to explore materials and a new direction for my work.”
Mr Noble has been teaching at the Strathspey secondary school for the past two years. He said: “Grantown was the first school that I was given after I ticked the box to work anywhere in Scotland and they have kept me on which is perfect because my artwork is really about this sort of landscape.
“This is where I would come for inspiration to find wild landscapes and wild woods and that sense of nature being more present rather than dominated by humans as is the case further south.”
Mr Noble has found teaching at the school to be really rewarding and feels more attuned to his surroundings than ever before. “I love it; it is brilliant. It is a great community and it feels like I have plugged into the Grantown community as well. I have never felt this before.
“At previous schools, say in the central belt, I was always the one person talking about the wild woods and the ecological importance of pinewoods and so on but in this school it seems that I am talking a similar language.
On his pupils’ reaction to his award-winning art, Mr Noble said: “I really enjoy interacting with the pupils as a counter to this isolated studio life at home which benefits me... I am not sure what they really think about my art – hopefully that it is quite magical and different to what they normally see.”
Meditation in the Mountain Pass is a celebration of the Highland location Mr Noble now calls home and features the Lairig Ghru.
The style of mixed media piece was also inspired by four months in China and a year of teacher training and captures a ‘sense of returning to and celebrating my studio practice’.
Mr Noble said: “Being here is like winning the lottery in a way.
“The job could have been anywhere else but I got here and that’s sweet.”
The school has said they are lucky too to have the artist inspiring pupils.
Dugal McCrow, principal teacher of art and design, and computing science teacher said: “We are really proud of Mr Noble’s achievement with the RSA Award.
“His skills and experience are really benefiting our pupils.
“Hopefully this award will inspire them to submit their own work to the Royal Scottish Academy pupil competitions.
“Mr Noble’s work really shows how artists can successfully bring together a range of interests: environmental, spiritual, cultural, mythological, in order to make their work.”
His wife Georgia Rose Murray has recently set up an artist’s studio in the YM Centre in Grantown where she creates her Arctic inspired landscapes in oils.
Winner of an RSA Latimer Award... ‘Meditation on the Mountain Pass’.
In the painting:
Distant blue vibrating hanging mountain pass, the Larig Ghru. Melting purple heather mountains. Oscillating sine vibrations of abyssal black and ochre varnish duality. Shimmering gold pigment. Mist splodges float. Roaming wandering sanguine line work of distant native wild wooded knoll. A hooded figure sits and contemplates the hypnotic unitive enwooded eternal moment. An exploration of Eastern aesthetics found in the wild woods of the Highlands. Golden adder diamond patterns rotate. A scribbled full moon hangs. Japonisme psychedelia. Wilderness wood aesthetics.
Behind the painting:
There is a celebration of the highland location I have been lucky to live in after a ‘tick the box’ art teacher probation year. This was the first studio based return to mixed media piece after four months in China, a year of teacher training and a relocation to the highlands, so a sense of returning to and celebrating my studio practice. This theme of return is also found in the aesthetics of the painting, I revisited an old Chinese landscape inspired piece in the hanging landmass/ tree silhouette on the right and also older pieces where I interrogated the Chinese ‘blue green’ landscape aesthetics before the ‘malachite phase’.
* Discover more of the artist’s work at www.kylenoble.com
