On Sunday the 11th of October, Harrogate Theatre hosted an exhibition of Noel Fielding's paintings as part of Harrogate Comedy Festival.
Being a huge fan of Noel Fielding's writing, costume design and acting as Vince Noir in The Mighty Boosh, I had already encountered his brilliant artwork before and was very excited to see it in the flesh. Fielding is a man of many hats and a master of all things creative, my favourite of his works being the costume designs and short animations he produced for The Mighty Boosh.
The above clip is a short animation from The Mighty Boosh, featuring Noel's abstract characters and whacky stories. A fictional children's book within a tv show for alternative teenagers and young adults, 'Charlie' both haunts and inspires me. It's nonsensical, it's memorable.
I was expecting the exhibition to reflect this style and be some kind of interactive, comical feat, similarly to Noel Fielding's Luxury Comedy Live that I went to see in Hull earlier this year. I expected costumes, props and the world of his mind to be encapsulated within the exhibition.
[Photo taken by James Paylor]
I was a little disappointed by the exhibition. Noel Fielding is known for his eccentricity and his loud, vibrant characters but in the classy and 'posh' theatre of Harrogate, his paintings were mounted in gold frames and hidden in the theatre bar. I don't think this suited his work and for me it really drove away from what makes his work so brilliant. In this context they just seemed out of place.
The exhibition was really just selling the paintings, which I think are less of a commercial prospect and more of a form of entertainment. I doubt that the population of Harrogate, and those who would visit the theatre bar, are really the type of people who would appreciate a painting of a naked unicorn.
I might be wrong, he may have fans in the area, but I doubt that they would purchase his artwork in this form.
Noel's actual audience would probably prefer t-shirts adorned with his bizarre
characters than purchasing a gold plated painting for a couple of thousand pounds.
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