Aaron Noble
Peter Pettengill, printer
2004-2005
Workshop: October 4-6, 2005
Los Angeles-based artist Aaron Noble made his first editioned print with master printer Peter Pettengill at the 2005 Smith College Print Workshop.
Noble was born in Portland, Oregon in 1961, and studied in San Francisco before becoming a muralist and performance artist in the early 1980s. He is the co-founder of Clarion Alley Mural Project (CAMP) in the San Francisco Mission district, and during that time began to paint murals inspired by the examples of the artists around him. Since the early 1990s, he has realized numerous public collaborative and solo murals in the United States, England, Czechoslovakia, Indonesia, Taiwan, and most recently, at the Davis Museum and Cultural Center at Wellesley College.
Inspired by Western comics, graffiti, Japanese anime and manga, and video games—as well as a variety of “high” and “low” art sources—Noble creates murals, paintings, and drawings featuring collaged and morphed superhero body parts and comic backgrounds. These free-floating conglomerations pulsate with impotent and malevolent energy.
For his first print project, Noble and master printer Peter Pettengill embarked on a complex, twelve-color aquatint etching, using lift-ground for the important black “key” plate, which the artist typically draws last in his drawings and paintings.
Aaron Noble. American, 1961 –
Hard‑ground etching, aquatint, spit‑bite etching, lift‑ground etching,
white‑ground etching,
drypoint, and roulette printed in
color on BFK Rives paper
Sheet: 30 in x 22 3/4 in; plate: 21 3/8 in x 17 13/16 in