Channah Noelle Fine Art

  • Just Like a Pitcher, Oil, 11×14
    I’m excited to share some interesting facts about my artworks here. For instance, the frog here represents unpredictability. While I was working on this piece from direct observation, many folks decided to pick up some of my arranged items for a closer look. This resulted in quite a few re-paintings, especially of the reflections! At the end, I added the frog. Even if you have a perfect plan in your mind for how things should go, something serendipitous can still hop in.

  • Quest, Oil, 24×36
    Quest features my greatest love and greatest nemesis: sunbeams. I finished Quest around 2019, and the sunbeams, which were the finishing touch, had to be finished before I put the piece in a show. The perfect mix of water to paint to technique, coupled with the fact that scrubbing off a failure is a difficult process which can also take up the underlying delicate layers of fog, was a nightmare. As a younger artist, it broke me down to tears of frustration! As a more mature artist…it nearly does the same. But there’s something magical about them that compels me to keep struggling with them in almost every painting I’ve done so far.

  • Kitchen Intruder, Oil, 11×14
    Can you find the stegosaurus? I put him in because I wanted to add something fun. He was one of my favorite childhood toys, and I was delighted to suddenly notice his scales and frills were exactly the colors of the pot and the onion!

  • The Church at Rocky Bar, Acrylic, 11×14
    This little church was a few minutes outside of my grandparents’ home in rural Virginia. Sometimes when my grandmother suggests things for my paintings…well, I end up reluctantly sat at swap meets next to scrappers selling parts for lawn mowers–a noble profession in its own right, but it didn’t bring much traffic past my booth! An early core memory. In this case, though, I’m very glad I took her suggestion, and she was very pleased with the result. (A copy sits in her dining room!)

  • Meditation, Acrylic, 16×20
    This one is more grim, but comes with an interesting (in my opinion) historical anecdote. For a long time, the cause of the Maya empire’s collapse was unknown. No one answer seemed able to account for the wholesale collapse. Then, around 2021, a survey found cinnabar in the cenotes–the freshwater sinkholes around which the Maya cities were built. The toxic red mineral had been used to decorate palaces, washed off in the rain, and been re-applied until the concentration in the cenotes was enough (alongside other factors) to trigger an algae bloom. The ghoulish face in the painting has red streaks running down from its eyes: cinnabar, a mark of bloodshed, madness, and decrepit royalty whose specter nonetheless shapes its landscape. Staring directly at it doesn’t make it go away, nor does ignoring it; it’s appropriate to take a moment to acknowledge it before moving on, and that is the moment taken in this piece.

  • Take Us Deeper, Acrylic, 12×24
    In 1931, researchers William Beebe and Otis Barton set a record depth for ocean exploration in the bathysphere, a submersible that was lowered 1,426 feet into the ocean. On the ship above them, a trio of women–Gloria Hollister, Else Bostelmann, and Jocelyn Crane–communicated with the diver, drew the animals described, and attempted to identify them. While they didn’t find any strange or sinister structures (that they spoke of, at least), the monster fish in my painting is based off one of Bostelmann’s illustrations.