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Robert Amos: Artist finds a focus in complexity

Noah Becker was something of a wunderkind in Victoria. Born in 1970, he enrolled at the Victoria College of Art at age 15, graduating in 1988.

Noah Becker was something of a wunderkind in Victoria. Born in 1970, he enrolled at the Victoria College of Art at age 15, graduating in 1988.

Joseph Kyle was leading the school in the direction of pure abstraction; Bill Porteous, Becker’s drawing teacher, was plugged into the best of American art; Jim Gordaneer introduced him to oil paint. Though Becker has since pursued his career in New York, hobnobbing with the likes of Frank Stella, of his Victoria training he said: “You couldn’t have better painting and drawing teachers.”

One day in 1988, Becker walked through the open door of Glenn Howarth’s studio, at 16 1Ú2 Fan Tan Alley: “I went up there — that was during my friendly and curious phase — and there was Glenn.” Howarth showed Becker some of his paintings — women swimming underwater, seen from below.

“It was the kind of work that I like didn’t know existed in Victoria,” he said, and immediately signed up for Howarth’s drawing classes. Becker soon moved with his studiomate Trevor Guthrie to a nearby space at 14 Fan Tan Alley.

“It seemed like it all happened so fast,” Becker recalled, “like a whirlwind.” Marlene Davis, a classmate who had been showing with the Fran Willis Gallery, introduced Becker to Michael Williams, and Williams, already a patron of Howarth, began to buy Becker’s paintings. The Williams Collection, now part of the University of Victoria’s Art Collections, includes more than 40 of Howarth’s works, and 13 of Becker’s from that period.

Soon Becker’s huge portrait of Tchaikovsky was hanging in the Royal Theatre, and he had a sold-out solo show in the Gold Room at Michael Williams’ Swans Pub. Then, while working for his parents’ shop, Herald Street Art World, Becker delivered a framing order to the original Winchester Gallery, and owner Bernie Raffo offered him a show.

Winchester was at the time the outlet of the Limners and many artists associated with the Victoria College of Art. Becker was showing beside work by Richard Ciccimarra, Herbert Siebner and Jack Wilkinson.

“Wow — I’ll never be that good,” he thought at the time. Half way through his exhibition, Winchester was purchased by Gunter Heinrich and Anthony Sam. “Bernie kind of passed me on to them,” Becker recalled.

Becker was full of ambition, as a painter and a saxophone player. His friends asked: “Why are you hanging around here? Why don’t you go and conquer the world?” He moved to New York for the first time in 1997, and from his new home in Brooklyn created art shows and played jazz.

“I was there during the George W. Bush presidency,” he told me. “The emphasis in America was on war, not on art: the war on terror, the war in Iraq. What I was doing was not the focus.” Then in 2001, with the events of 9/11, “everything went haywire. A lot of artists and musicians were out of a job.” So he returned to Victoria.

From a base in Victoria, he pursued a wider career.

“I always wanted to have an international market, rather than the local thing,” Becker explained. In the next 10 years, he exhibited in Vancouver, was presented by several American galleries, and regularly went to the Miami Art Fair and Art Basel. Then, a “traumatic experience with a gallery” made him realize that he couldn’t pursue an international career this way.

“We’re on an island and it’s remote,” he said. “You have to overcome the marginalization somehow.” He returned to New York in 2009.

Back in 2005, he had read predictions of “the end of the newspaper,” and thought “that’s going to happen in the art world.” So he began White Hot magazine, an online forum for art writing.

“It could have been called a dot.com,” Becker ventured. But he called it a magazine, and it became widely imitated. Even so, it’s hard to make a living in the field.

“Now everybody is a publisher,” he smiled. “The publishing industry has gotten screwed up, just like the music industry … it’s just a free-for-all.”

While he acknowledges the archaic nature of the medium, Becker continues to paint. Yet his mentor Howarth was a pioneer in “digital painting” in the early 1980s. Becker told me about a day when, as a kid obsessed with making art, he found Howarth absorbed in writing. He asked him: “When you are finished writing, are you going to get back to work?” Howarth informed him “that is the work. It’s all the work.”

It is interesting to note that another of Becker’s inspirations also spanned the divide between painting and digital media. Becker met Michael Morris in 1995. While Morris maintained an international career as a painter, in the early 1970s he had invented Image Bank, a communications forum acknowledged to have been “the Internet without the Internet.”

Becker said: “That was a lesson for me. I always thought it was about applying paint to canvas. Michael Morris didn’t see the divisions. He had his network everywhere.”

Back in New York since 2009, Becker continues to paint and run White Hot magazine (whitehotmagazine.com). As a painter, he takes clues from Breughel, Hieronymus Bosch and Goya. In his recent work, the narrative aspect has come to the fore, “to slow the viewer down,” as he says. His complex compositions give insight to his views on the interactions of people and how they live.

 

Noah Becker at Trounce Alley Gallery, 616 Trounce Alley, 250-217-8320, trouncealleygallery.com, until April 30.