Inside the Headspace of a Beloved Philadelphia Art Academy Professor

by Omonike Shaunice Ajiwe

The first noticeable thing about Professor William Scott Noel is not the way he looks. It’s his surroundings, which is a fitting explanation of his character as a whole. Everything about him screams seasoned artist. On the afternoon of our chat, he is surrounded by replicas of famous sculptures in a lesser known section of the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. He quietly talks to a student while standing in the imposing shadow of a huge copy of Michelangelo’s David. He strolls throughout the hall of statues in silence, moving around sheets of glass and buckets of paint. Just by glancing at him, one would have no clue what he’s doing but he makes it look like it makes sense. His friendly voice echoes in the huge room of statues. It amplifies the comedic pauses in the absurd things he is loved throughout PAFA for saying.

He doesn’t have a phone. He doesn’t have an email address. What he does have is a career spanning around 40 years across the U.S., 22 of those years spent teaching the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. Aside from being known as an eccentric yet genius professor of painting and drawing at the academy – one who avoids technology and cracks the occasional off hand joke about syphilis or story about hallucinogenics – he is known throughout the Philadelphia art scene for dozens of art shows, curating exhibitions for museums across the east coast, and his pieces featured in private, public, and corporate collections.

Scott Noel in his studio

But it is teaching that appears to bring him the most joy as an artist and educator.

“I like everything about teaching because you get to meet people in the most beautiful circumstances. When you’re teaching – especially when you’re teaching art – you’re meeting people that want to do this and have a kind of drive to study art, a deep intuitive love for doing it,” said Noel of his career. “And then alongside that, I get to teach and talk about the thing I love the most, which is painting and drawing, especially painting and drawing figures. The whole deal: to meet people who are pursuing their best selves and getting to talk about something that feels like the best expression of my best self. That’s about as good a job as you’re ever gonna get.”

And yet, like any young adult actively looking for either a career and a role in the world, his decision to embark on the career path of art wasn’t so simple or set in stone. Noel sees some of this struggle that he had within in his own students.

“I was studying art and loved it but confronted at a very early age the same thing confronts any young artist. It’s that art is a difficult job to do to make a living because no one asks you to do it. So, you have to find a gig that will support your studio work. I was in college when I realized then that I enjoyed talking about art with anybody who was interested. So, when I was 22 I walked into graduate school and I was given a class to teach. It was kind of like getting thrown into the deep water.”

Sculpture replica room at PAFA.

Noel has a teaching style that exudes his almost philosophical connection with people and art and blends with his oddness. His students seem this thrive under it. Third-year painting major, Raven Squire, sees it as a strength.

“I think his oddness is just him being raw really. I think he’s showing us all of him in its most vulnerable and pure state. It allows students to open up to him as well and be vulnerable and raw and curious. His process is like a building method which I admire. Having a method to the madness, giving us eccentric descriptions, crazy references or stories just to show that building is just as beautiful as the final piece,” Squire said of the painter’s teaching styles.

Noel isn’t totally unaware of the mythos surrounding him in Philadelphia’s art student circles. He himself has this to say of his unordinary character:

“I think [my students] find me completely eccentric and sort of insane. Because I’m very unfiltered, because I’m getting to talk with them about something that I would talk about with anybody if they were interested. I think the other thing that my students get the benefit of is that I’ve been doing this for a long time so I have to keep reinventing the narratives that I share with my students so that I don’t bore myself to death.”

Artists like Squire who study with Noel both as a student and colleague see the method to his supposed madness and can gain inspiration from it. Noel himself, gains inspiration and reverence from both much older art greats and his own colleagues. Art history icons from Edgar Degas, Diego Velasquez, Rembrandt, Michelangelo, and Philadelphia native Mary Cassatt to the local PAFA professor Thomas Aikens are on Noel’s long list of inspirational forbearers.

It’s deeply strange to think of Noel in any other job than this one. It’s like trying to redefine a word or coming up with a new color. He fills the role perfectly, and his students agree.

“I couldn’t really imagine him doing anything else,” Squire says of him. “Maybe he could be a conductor; the way he creates his pieces is almost like conducting an orchestra.”

Noel has considered some other career paths, from practical pursuits like law to a church vocation out of his appreciation for biblical tales, but managed to combine his interest in all reaches of the humanities and the arts in his youth to come up with “the perfect job.”

“When I was in my teens I loved art but it was a kind of private activity, and my gateway influences were not unlike any kid today. I loved certain comic book heroes and illustrators and I loved movie posters and graphic art of all kinds. But weirdly enough with my love of the church, law, history, philosophy – I found the perfect job, because art touches all of this things in some strange way.”

As for his future, Noel, now 62, states that he has fewer years left than there are behind him, but stills plans to always work diligently and perpetually apply his personal philosophy about the commodity of time.

“One of the things that art cultivates within anyone who does it, is that the most precious commodities of all is time. A really good definition of being an artist is a person who is extravagant with time, because you’ll do anything it takes to achieve the thing you need to do, and you’ll take as much time to do it as you can. So right now, as I get older, I think all those things are more true than ever. The main goal is to not waste my time and energy, and give myself unstintingly to the things I care about, which are making it, but also transmitting it to people who are interested. As a teacher, I’m kind of a performer. I get people to engage things that they kind of think they like a little, but more openly because I give them permission through the kooky way that I perform to be open to it in a way. So, my future is to keep doing that: to keep making it and evangelizing it for the art that – all art really not just the art that I like, all art – for as long as I can which hopefully will be a good long while. But as I tell my students, each day you work, draw and paint as if this was the last day. Cause it could be, you never know!”

#art #education #pafa