Noelle Phares - New Paintings

Phares' body of work combines landscape elements with man-made structures and figures to explore the way that humans interact with the natural world. She aims to both raise awareness of the fragile beauty of these places while also highlighting how beautiful and functional man-made design + nature can be if done with symbiosis, instead of nemesis, in mind. Her paintings at times depict architecture or the artist's own use of graphic elements and window-like settings to create a harmony of the organic and constructed.

Enmeshed in this dialogue between the natural world and human intervention is the plant-life that is so lushly described in Phares paintings, where plants serve both as important markers of each particular biome, but also illustrate how plants are cultivated, ordered, modified, and integrated into our built environments. If mountains, plains, gorges, and coasts are the set, then plants are the costumes on the stage of Earthly existence. This series entitled “Proud Canopy” pays homage to these photosynthetic beings, setting them as the protagonists in this set of paintings portraying mostly landscapes from the Western US. Phares examines the landscape through the lens of its plant-life and finds it to be a uniquely nuanced way to interpret place. Overstory structure determines the nature of light that filters down to the surface below, the dappled patterns as divergent as a snowflake’s architecture.