In Noah’s paintings, a blue sofa becomes an ocean and the bodys rafts. Floating within a domestic ocean, his subjects pose as a body, just a bunch of limbs. Posed in this obscure way gives us – the viewer – an opportunity to consider their thoughts, their relationship to themselves, their raft and to Noah – who seeks to create an equal space between himself and his subjects; lowering barriers to create illustrations of intimacy, connection and respect – transcending the realms of our bodies in search of connections and entanglements not of our present spaces, but further out, beyond the seas. 

Ultramarine blue is made with the pigment lapis lazuli. A pigment that, during the Italian renaissance, was so hard to obtain (and expensive to use) that its use was restricted to paint only the robe of the Virgin Mary. We can’t touch the blue sky nor can we fill a glass with blue water, the colour is illusive, it surrounds us but it’s constantly out of reach. It’s for this reason that the colour, so often, symbolically presents dreams, the heavens and the unconscious mind. Noah’s series of paintings presented here, refers directly to the Italian word ultramarino, which translates to Beyond the seas.