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Christopher

Noxon

Available Art

Making pictures

For those of you who know me mostly from my writing, a recap: I started painting seriously after moving to Ojai in 2020. I was wrecked from the loss of my son and started working in the studio behind my house mainly as something to do besides feel miserable. Writing has always been super hard for me - I love having written but the truth is I kinda hate to write. I literally have to set a timer to make myself do it (OK for the next 30 minutes ONLY NEW WORDS NO CHECKING EMAIL OR DICKING AROUND). I know if I concentrate and work really hard, I can get the words to sound something like me. Making art isn’t like that. I’m out of my head. The truth is I don’t know what I’m doing. I sometimes have to set a timer to know when to STOP. I love all the materials and techniques and colors and layers. And the best part is I don’t know what’s going to happen or how something will turn out. I feel like I’m a witness more than a maker.

When I started I was mostly doing paintings of crowds, scenes of protest marches similar to the illustrations in my book “Good Trouble: Lessons from the Civil Rights Playbook.” In those pictures of bodies forming big abstract patterns, I was trying to capture the feeling of being in a group gathered around a higher purpose. I was also, it only occurred to me after many months and many paintings, using art to fill a more personal need (isn’t that always the case?). It was the height of the pandemic and like so many of us, I felt isolated and lonely and terrified at the state of the world. I craved crowds. I was like a cartoon man crawling across a desert, drawing pictures of pitchers of cold water.

At a certain point I switched from people to places. I can tell you precisely when that happened - it was a bright early summer morning and I was sitting in my studio, looking out the barn doors at an enormous outcropping of pricky pear cactus. In a flash, heads and bodies appeared in the shapes, a whole gathering right outside my door.

I made a so-so painting of those cacti and was off to the races, chasing scenes and panoramas and shapes and colors from walks and hikes and travels around Ojai and the surrounding wilderness. The work has gone from flat and graphic to layered and scratchy and abstractly patterned. I try to let the pictures tell me what they want and get out of the way. I believe it: the vortex is real. There’s an energy and spirit in this place, as tangible and powerful as the feeling you get amid crowds of people raising their voices together. It’s a simultaneous feeling of awe and humility, of togetherness and singularity, of personal insignificance and limitless possibility. The landscape contains it all.