About the Artist

AUDRA NOBLE

Audra Noble was born in Hamilton and has resided in the Toronto area since attending Ryerson University where she received her BAA.

Technically, the content of Noble’s art continually evolves. She is masterful in black and white photography. Digital technology enticed her to work with colour imaging, and the computer is an important part of her toolbox. She recently started incorporating acrylic and watercolour paintings with her photographs.

Creatively, her intensely coloured images represent the passion and the personal sensuality she experiences in life through her art. The curvatures and colours embody how she feels about her own body and the efforts she makes to keep it healthy and vital. Her black and white works are more evocative and meaningful than most landscape images. They hint strongly of an abstract realm that has organically crumpled or strengthened under the weight of time and nature.

Nature and its effects on our world inspire most of her images, whether photographic or mixed media.

She always loved art and started painting when she was seven. Her painting endeavours have continued on and off throughout her life. Twenty years ago Noble started her career in photography when she took courses at Ryerson. Since then she has traveled the world making photographs and continually increasing her sensitivity to its possibilities.

After receiving her BAA and B. Ed., Noble began teaching Business subjects in high school. The Art Department Head asked her to start a Photography programme and, although she had been photographing for a relatively short period at that time, she was thrilled to accept the challenge. The programme started two years later and grew to become a full third of the Art Department. Some of her students have remained close to her and have continued their endeavours in various creative capacities.

Noble’s formal training continued at Ryerson after her first course, but she also took courses in Paris through New York’s Parsons School of Design with Ben Fernandez, and in Mexico, Hong Kong and China with James Doukas, and in Spain with David Skolnick of the Ontario College of Art and Design. She has taken photography courses at the Maine Photographic Workshops and was awarded a scholarship to attend a workshop at the Santa Fe Photographic Workshops.

Noble has exhibited since 1988. Her work is shown and collected internationally and her reputation with art connoisseurs continues to grow. She takes part in Contact, an annual photographic festival . Since starting to photograph, Noble has intertwined her own creative intere sts in it with those of others. Besides teaching high school photography, she taught photography and digital imaging courses for PhotoEducators Forum, Kodak’s Teachers Forum, G allery 44 Centre for Contemporary Photography, and the Markham Group of Artists, amongst others. She has written articles for Kodak, Art Post, Gallery de Boer, and Markham Group of Artists. Her work has been published and written about in calendars by Second Story Press and Sumach Press and in PhotoEd magazine, Education Forum Magazine, Photo Life, Nikon International Annual Book and most recently in the Scrivener Creative Review by McGill University. She has produced a limited edition hand-made book, Dark Moon, made up of black and white images and ancient haiku which address the grief of losing a loved one. Noble has recently garnered three juried art awards and she was recently accepted into the Ontario Society of Artists.