Having been so impressed with his work, I wanted to meet Paul Noble. It made sense to end the feature I was writing for cva with a visit to his studio so that was what was set up. I remember that Paul’s first words to me were something along the lines of: “Well, what’s your interest in Nobson Newtown?” A fair enough question. And I tried to answer it honestly, though I’ve no idea what I actually said. But am I not a post-war child of the Twentieth Century? Was I not brought up in a town of 50,000 people and no art galleries?
We spent an hour or more together. Here’s how I wrote up the meeting in the pages of the journal, from the moment of my arrival. If I remember rightly, I’d travelled by bus from Forest Hill, where I’d lived in a bedsit for ten years, to Camberwell, another part of south London.
‘Paul’s Palace. There’s no bell. I just have to shout through the letterbox in the hope that I can be heard in the first-floor studio. In the pouring rain, I shout again from the middle of the sp ace in front of the building, a former bus depot. The door opens.
‘In the cavernous studio, water is dripping from the ceiling in several places. Buckets have been placed strategically, but the floor is wet in patches. On one wall are two drawings-in-progress, seemingly larger than any I’ve seen so far. Opposite is another pair, one little more than faint outlines of letters in the Nobson font, which ultimately will go above the other pair to produce a single massive scene of the centre of Nobson Newtown. It’s an utterly desolate view - row upon row of ruined buildings, the un-centre of old Nobson, destroyed but not cleared. Everywhere, irregular chunks of plaster are bound to crumbling roofs and walls by tentacles... or are they chunks of steel-reinforced concrete, the steel rods bent and visible?...The artist moves from where he has been standing talking to me, because water is dr ipping on to his head. He usually wears a hat in the studio. I recall from the text in the little publication that accompanied the Chisenhale show that it is impossible to buy an umbrella in Nobson Newtown.
‘The work is for a show in New York, the date of which has been put back. There is a problem keeping the paper dry, and the drawings are taking longer than expected. Paul has been meticulously drawing boulders strewn over the dug-up roads on one sheet, which means he’ll have to do the same with the other three. Very time-consuming. But he wants a mind-blowing effect, however long it takes. I look up at the high ceiling. White with grey patches, dripping. Again I’m wondering if it’s white-painted concrete or plaster. Then I realise it’s nobrock.’
‘I mention some other people (the author of Gormenghast, the architect of Portmeirion, M.C. Escher, Magritte, C.S. Lewis, Gunter Brus) whose work has been cited in connection with Paul Noble’s, without getting a positive respons e. He’s interested in the Victorian paintings of John Martin at the moment. And when he was working on the C.L.I.P.O.N. drawing, all the tubes and pipes and cylinders gave an opportunity for him to practise lots of Tom of Finland-style shading. I stop searching for connections and influences, and look again at the drawings pinned to the wall. I recall that the wasteland centre is described in the Chisenhale book as a place of beauty, a retreat. And before I can stop myself I’m mentioning the films of Tarkovsky.
‘With alacrity, Paul refers to the long scene in Stalker where the protagonist progresses away from his starting point by throwing a stone with a sling, making his way to its landing place, and when he gets there, throwing it again so that it’s then twice the distance from his starting point, but he still only has a single stone’s throw to traverse. And so the man goes somewhere. One chuck at a time. The artist sees a parallel with his own working practice.’
‘It gets me thinking of the scene in Nostalgia where a Russian poe t has followed a village savant into his abode, from the ceiling of which water streams onto the floor. There’s just enough room on a dry patch between puddles for an Alsatian to contentedly stretch itself out. The camera dwells on the sparkling streams of water. Splashing reverberates around the chamber in a hypnotic way... A magical place, like this one, full of simple things and spiritual ripples and Tom of Finland-style shading.
‘On the studio wall is a watercolour sketch of LIDO NOB which is to be the subject of another large drawing. In the last scene of Nostalgia - after the savant has poured petrol over himself and perished in a ball of flames as a protest against the inhumanity of modern life - the poet walks with a flickering candle across an ancient pool that’s been drained of it’s healing waters, unfortunately pegging out just as he successfully completes the crossing... I decide not to bother the artist with this perspective, just in case it has gratuitously negative overtones.’
- contemporary visual arts, issue 23
Nobson Central is the name of the work that Paul was talking to me about, and working on, the day of my studio visit. It’s dated 1998/9 and is four metres long and three metres high. An artist’s book, Nobson Central, was published by Walther Konig of Cologne, in 2000, and that’s where the above illustrations are taken from. The book completely reproduces the drawing in page form, adding nothing. In other words, the book starts with the top left corner and then proceeds from left to right, in rows, until ending in the bottom right corner of the drawing. One composition; four sheets of pencil-on-paper; 210 pages of ink on paper. The book, if its pages were all laid out side by side, would give an image 12 or 13 times bigger than the pencil drawing. The above illustrations are reproduced from the book at about 70%. So these pictures are in the order of 9 times the size of the drawing itself. By reproducing three of them I’m showing one percent of the total work. I hope that’s not too much in terms of the artist’s copyright. I hope it’s enough to give the viewer both pleasure and an idea of the scale of what’s been attempted.
I like the idea of taking a massive drawing and making it even bigger, but in such a way that its rich detail is made available to the human eye. I also like the idea of overview. With Nobson Newtown one is constantly looking for a way of going from magnifying glass to bird’s eye view:
Last week I received the 2004 Whitechapel catalogue, Paul Noble, in the post, a high quality publication throughout. The above reproduction of the whole of Nobson Central is scanned from the book, forgive the central fold. Photographs by Leonard Sempolinski of Warsaw city centre after the blitz, taken from the book Warsaw in Ruins, have clearly made an impact on the artist, the impact spilling into Nobson Central. But one has to bear in mind the subtlety with which this work has been put together. At the very centre of Nobson Central is an egg (a quarter of the egg appears on each of the large sheets of paper, as you can make out from the above image), on which is a drawing of the shopping mall which is right in the centre of Nobson Newtown.
I was thinking of Nobson Central when I took the shot of my screen (below) using Google Earth. It shows the middle of Whitley Bay, the image centred on Park View Shopping Centre (blue tack). ‘Come friendly bombs and fall on Whitley Bay,’ is not a line from a poem by John Betjeman. But you feel it could be. What I mean is, on the one hand Paul Noble is thinking of the appalling destruction and waste of life evidenced by photographs of European cities that were blanket-bombed at the end of the Second World War. On the other, he is surely lamenting an absence of culture in the town and wider society in which he was brought up.
While I’m at it, here is an aerial view of Leytonstone. Paul Noble was living here at the time of the protests against the building of the M11 in the early 90s, protests that he and his artist friends and associates played a part in. The house he lived in on Fillebrooks Road (close to the red A below ) was destroyed, in a process whereby many streets were razed to the ground. In short, the A12 (which is what the link to the M11 was eventually called) cut a swathe through East London, laying waste to communities.
The essay by Anthony Spira in the Witechapel catalogue states that a starting point for Nobson Central is an extract from The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot. Lines from the poem are spread across the whole composition, as letter-buildings. Footnote 10 to Spira’s piece, states that the Eliot extract includes the opening lines: ‘April is the cruellest month, breeding / Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing / Memory and desire.’ I’m glad to say that the quality of the reproduction of Nobson Central in the Whitechapel catalogue is good enough for this to be followed up.
Careful reading of the destroyed Nobson font letters of the top line gives you ‘APRIL IS THE CRUELLIST’. The very last word in the whole composition would appear to be WINTER. At that stage, in order to save strain on my eyes and my deductive powers, I looked up the wording of the poem. It goes like this:
April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers.
Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee
With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade,
And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten,
And drank coffee, and talked for an hour.
Bin gar keine Russin, stamm’ aus Litauen, echt deutsch.
And when we were children, staying at the archduke’s,
My cousin’s, he took me out on a sled,
And I was frightened. He said, Marie,
Marie, hold on tight. And down we went.
In the mountains, there you feel free.
I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter.
It becomes clear that as the artist went through the verse, he left out letters, words and lines. He would have done this, I imagine, so that there is no shortcut to making out the words but poring over them. Certainly there was no shortcut for me. The letters underlined and in bold below are the ones that are rendered in Nobson font, then blasted, bombed and eroded in various ways to make them virtually indecipherable. However, with the verse structure to guide the eye, with the number of letters in each word being a pretty consistent rule (after some funny business with ‘breeding lilacs’), and with certain letters, such as N, G and A being particularly hard to disguise, one arrives at this:
April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers.
Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee
With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade,
And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten,
And drank coffee, and talked for an hour.
Bin keine gar Russin, stamm’ aus Litauen, echt deutsch.
And when we were children, staying at the archduke’s,
My cousin’s, he took me out on a sled,
And I was frightened. He said, Marie,
Marie, hold on tight. And down we went.
In the mountains, there you feel free.
I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter.
So what Paul Noble started with, printed lightly in Nobson font over the four large sheets of paper that were to make up Nobson Central, was this:
APRIL IS THE CRUELLIST
MONTH DING LACS OUT OF
THE DEAD LAND, MIXING
MEMORY AND DESIRE,
WARM COVERING EARTH
ED TUBERS. SUMMER
SURPRISED US COMING
OF WE HOFGARTEN.
AND DRANK FOR AN BIN
KEINE GAR DEUTSCH
STAYING DOWN MUCH
OF IN WINTER
This is hard won information on my part. I was stuck for a while, because I’d read a three-letter word as WAS, in the fourth last line of the verse, whereas it’s GAR, from the single line of German. The significance of the mistake was that it made me pore over words from the wrong part of the verse, the 15th line rather than the 12th. Why did I make the mistake? Well, here is what I was looking at, sandwiched between two other lines of text:
I thought it was this:
However, after making little progress with the last three lines of text in the drawing, I realised this might well be the point at which I was getting things wrong. Close study of the Nobson font key plan, together with repeated scrutiny of the Nobson Central reproduction in the Whitechapel catalogue with the aid of a magnifying glass, told me the three-letter word was this:
“How could you have been so stupid?” you’ll be saying. Yeah, well thanks. But at least I got there in the end. I know it didn’t take me as long to read the piece as it took Paul Noble to write and almost unwrite it (check out the negative space of the R!), but I did think I deserved to read the next verse of The Waste Land straight from Gutenberg’s online version. Well, not quite straight from there. I couldn’t resist changing one word:
What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water. Only
There is shadow under this nob rock,
(Come in under the shadow of this nob rock),
And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.
If my efforts with a magnifying glass don’t warrant the use of that verse, then surely Paul Noble’s sustained effort with pencils do.
I think I’ll leave it there for now. My eyes hurt.
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