Noel Betowski

Noel Betowski. Artist Noel Betowski trained in Fine Art painting at The Central School of Art and London University ‘Institute of Education‘. He has been a professional painter since the mid 1980s exhibiting extensively at galleries which include ‘The Royal Academy’ (Summer Shows etc) and The National Portrait Gallery. In 1986 & 1987 Noel was a prize-winner of the ‘John Constable Award‘ at The Camden Annual, London. 'Noel Betowski - Triptych' is now available. For information about this new book see the news page.

90s
“Round about 1990 my son Paul who was 4 years old at the time asked me to draw a toy shop. From this sketch I produced a small painting, very quickly and remembering my own childhood. The concept grew from this painting into the large Triptychs that I am still working on to some extent today.”

“1990 seems to be an important year for the direction in my painting. In conjunction with the toy shop painting I started drawings of Mounts bay. Living in Gulval I walked every day into Penzance town where I had my studio/gallery, I would mentally take note of the boats & ships on that area of water. For a long time I had the urge to put these boats into my paintings but felt that it was too much of a cliché, it was however such a good image, relating to my own childhood where I would daily see shipping going up and down the Thames. I began to see the problem as a challenge, to do something more original with such a cliché. I started by imagining the bay at one moment in time but with all the boats & ships that I had seen over a number of years, gradually the boats became more & more compacted so that from a distance it took on the feeling of
movement, waves, current, rhythmic interweaving which directly linked
into the music that was a very strong facet of my character.
“I started to realise that I could bring all the threads of my lifelong interests & history together into one painting, The earlier painting ‘Offspring’ which I believed at the time to be the end of a long series of paintings starting from the ‘Forsythia’ drawing now became the springboard for a whole new direction for my work.”