Thursday, Oct. 2, the College of William and Mary’s department of art and art history hosted Philadelphia-based painter Scott Noel for a lecture and exhibit in Andrews Hall, part of the department’s visiting artist series supported by Jean Berger Estes ’75, P ’06 and Rob Estes ’74, P ’06. Noel has exhibited in over 40 solo shows nationwide and taught for decades at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, where he mentored current College faculty members teaching professor of art Dave Campbell and associate professor of art John Lee.
Introduced by Lee as a dynamic teacher whose mentorship was life-changing, Noel reflected on his long-standing connection to the College, tracing it back to 1989, when his work was first exhibited on campus.
“I taught here for a couple of weeks in 1997, and now, two of my most delightful students are professors here,” Noel said. “That’s a real thrill. It reflects the kind of change and continuity that art itself embodies — it’s like a river, bigger than the people who find themselves in it.”
One of the most striking moments of Noel’s lecture came during a slide of “Rosie Adams,” a nude portrait painted over two sweltering summer days.
“This is Rosie Adams. I only got to paint her once,” Noel said. “She was a friend of Patrice, whom you saw earlier in the slideshow, and said she wanted to try modeling. So I said, ‘Sure, come out and we’ll paint.’ But when she arrived in late August, basically 100 degrees, she told me she was moving to New Orleans in a couple days.”
Noel painted for two full days, pushing to finish the six-foot canvas before she left.
“You can see the sweat on Rosie,” he said. “I kind of like the pressure of that kind of situation. It forces me to get it done. And I think you can feel that urgency in the final painting.”
Among the students in attendance was Hannah Nieman ’26, a studio art and accounting major, who was struck by the way Noel spoke about his models as collaborators, not passive subjects whose presence shaped the rhythm and feel of a painting.
“One thing I took away was his relationship with his models,” Nieman said. “It made me think differently about how those relationships could be more like friendships.”
She suggested that a painting’s emotional quality may emerge more from trust than technique.
Noel also discussed his alla prima technique, Italian for “all at once,” which is a wet-on-wet approach that demands speed and decisiveness.
“It means I complete a section of a painting in one go, wet-on-wet,” Noel said. “It’s like fresco — you have to finish before the surface dries. That immediacy brings energy to the work.”
Katelyn Workman ’27, a studio art major, appreciated how Noel framed still life as a dynamic problem-solving space.
“Noel’s discussion around using still life as a laboratory to figure out painting problems was something that has stuck with me,” Workman said. “He talked about simplifying core color relationships to bring poetry and musicality as a unifying pull through the painting.”
For students outside the studio arts, the talk offered a rare glimpse into the layered thinking and technical rigor behind representational painting. Haram Kim ’26, a neuroscience major, said he was struck by the mythological themes and weightless compositions in Noel’s work.
“The floating people and objects fascinated me,” Kim said. “It felt believable and beautiful.”
He noted that while seemingly different, parallels do exist between art and neuroscience.
“Learning art gives us a language that neuroscience may one day catch up to,” Kim said.
In a conversation after the event, Noel offered a reflection on what sets painting apart from digital creation.
“AI is ones and zeros,” Noel said. “Painting is layered — this on top of this on top of this. Even the thinnest skin of oil paint has space in it. You can’t flatten that.”
He likened 3-D printing to slicing bread: an external replication of form without any sense of internal energy. What makes painting meaningful, he argued, is its resistance to perfection.
“Machines don’t struggle, but a painter does,” he said. “It’s the imperfections that make us whole.”
Noel added that artistic authenticity cannot endure on its own. People must take active measures to preserve a human touch when it comes to creating art.
“But if authenticity is to survive, it won’t be something that can be left to chance,” Noel said. “People will have to decide it matters enough to fight for it as a human possibility.”
For Caroline Cha ’26, a neuroscience and studio art double major, Noel’s emphasis on ambition and artistic risk-taking struck a personal chord.
“Scott [Noel] pointed us toward a higher aim in art: to work with a high level of ambition, even if there’s no call for it,” Cha said. “Even though we live in a time where the world might be pleased with pretty, self-satisfied pictures, it is still worth it, as an artist, to push ourselves to the very limit of our sensibilities.”
She described his work as a model for asking deeper questions: about space, perception and the feeling of being inside an environment.
“It made me excited to pick up that thread and continue it in my own way,” she said. “He reminded me these questions may take a lifetime to explore.”
In an email to the Flat Hat, John Lee, associate chair and professor of art and art history, wrote that inviting Noel back was about renewing the campus’s connection to visual meaning-making.
“Art is an aesthetically imaginative experience with deep meaning in its own right,” Lee wrote. “A world beyond themes and ideas — but no less vital to our sense of what it means to be human.”
