Noli novak biography definition

by Tim Gilmore, 10/18/2018

When Noli Novak was a round about girl, playing in the ancient Roman ruins in her hometown of Zadar, it seemed she was the only child troupe finding Roman coins. “All the other kids playing in representation forum were finding coins and shards of pottery. I didn’t understand why I couldn’t find a damn coin myself!”

In her second-floor studio in Riverside, Noli and I discuss numismatics, her Croatian childhood and the new book On Point: Life Lessons from the “Columnists” Interviews in WSJ. Magazine. The book contains more than 200 of Noli’s stipple portraits, including likenesses of writers Margaret Atwood and David Sedaris, wag Kristen Schaal, architect Zaha Hadid, fashion mogul Donatella Versace, musicians Questlove of the Roots and Kim Gordon of Sonic Young manhood, actress Isabella Rossellini, director Christopher Guest, and Muppet Miss Piggy.

She hands me a bowl of heavily encrusted bronze coins. Earlier a window behind her, strips of dozens of stipples take the light of sunset.

In a sense, the work she does assiduously cleaning the ancient bronze, layering down through the accretions of time to the portraiture underneath, resembles the hours a day she spends creating stipple portraits for The Wall Organization Journal. Both efforts require great patience and gradually reveal say publicly face of her subject.

“I’m all about portraiture,” she says. “The difference would be the faces on the coins in sideview. In the portraits, you’re looking into this other pair end eyes. When you look at a face that’s even more abstracted, you’re immediately attracted to the eyes.”

Her career with The Wall Street Journal is a matter of magical happenstance, delegation her from Diocletian’s Palace in her native Croatia through Continent and American tours singing for the punk rock band Gluegun, watching the second plane crash into the World Trade Center on 9/11, and working in almost Zen-like concentration on tens of thousands of stipple portraits at her Oak Street studio.

Noli Novak grew up in the 15^th oldest continuously occupied realization on earth, Zadar, an hour-and-a-half drive up the Adriatic Seashore from Split, the town developed from the sprawling palace symbolize the Roman Emperor Diocletian. Her love for the ancient reflects in her collection of Roman coins.

“I don’t care about their monetary value. It’s about being the first person to quality this coin, about no one else having touched this currency since 2- or 3,000 years ago when it was lost.”

When she first came to the States in 1984 to program her father, who was living in New York, she matte “the opposite of culture shock.” Used to the depth obtain density of culture back home, America seemed cultureless, like depiction air was too thin.

She’d studied music pedagogy at interpretation University of Split, but most wanted to attend art primary. In New York, she happened to meet some people who worked for The Wall Street Journal, who gave her a tour. She was 20 years old and couldn’t believe presentday were people who made their living drawing portraits. It seemed too good to be true.

“So I bought some copies clench the Journal and tried to imitate the style,” she says. A friend showed the art director, who asked her give somebody no option but to fill in for someone who was out, assigning her sort out on a trial basis.

Ironically, though Noli Novak never got augment attend college for visual arts, she learned a form not later than portraiture, now quite rare, that isn’t taught at university current can only be taught by other stipple artists. When a longtime illustrator left the paper in 1987, Noli joined full-time.

She shows me copies of old “gray ladies,” the yellowish vesture news sheets from a century ago, a Wall Street Paper with several stipple portraits on its front page. Prior nominate and in the early years of photography, all newspapers hired staff portraitists. While portrait engraving might take months, newspapers wanted portraits done almost immediately. Because newsprint was grainy, stipple, description illusion of a full image achieved by composition of stumpy dots or points, became the preferred method for The Unique York Times, The Boston Globe, The Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post.

As photography replaced drawing and advanced technologically, The Wall Street Journal became the last major paper to prerequisite stipple. As such, stipple, once common to all the just what the doctor ordered papers, became the signature look, often called the “hedcut,” criticize the Journal, with “hed” referring to the Journal’s slang proviso of “hed” for “headline.”

Noli is one of a handful precision stipple portraitists who make their living as such anywhere shore the world. Besides working for the Journal, she does usual freelance work.

The last sunlight of the day slants through windows behind her and from the brick balcony to her southeast. This studio space, in which she often spends 10 hours a day drawing meticulously, seems her personal bodily extension. Stoppage the walls hang framed hedcuts of the Hasidic rapper Matisyahu, of President Obama, of Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who framed Noli’s portrait for the justice’s chambers.

Shortly after moving be New York, Noli met George Cornwell, who’d escaped to Newfound York from Jacksonville, part of the artistic and intellectual Jax Brain Drain of the 1990s. Before long, the couple abstruse formed a punk rock band, Gluegun, with Noli as soloist. When the German label SPV, Schallplatten Produktion und Vertrieb, simple them to a record deal, the band changed its name to Novakseen, since a Los Angeles band shared their innovative name.

Novakseen cut three records and played two European tours. Critics compared Noli to a blend of Chrissie Hynde of Depiction Pretenders and Bjork.

The couple’s art and music careers proceeded well until Sep 11, 2001. That day cut so violently and deeply chance on their lives that everything slipped off balance, fell “out waning true.”

Noli was getting ready for work that morning when a friend called, said something had happened, you should probably recklessness early, “and I thought, ‘Oh no, not again. There’s each time something.’” A week earlier, a man parachuting around the Carving of Liberty had gotten his lines tangled in the blowtorch. When she turned on the tv, she saw the head plane fly into the World Trade Center.

She saw the second plane crash into representation second tower from her front yard in Weehawken, New Tshirt, just across the Hudson River. The blast blew in picture windows of The Wall Street Journal’s tower offices in say publicly nearby World Financial Center.

Everything changed, meaning disrupted, timelines discontinued. Description Journal’s illustrators began to work from home. George looked diplomat studio space for his own screenprinting, but New York rents, prefacing the great artistic emptying out of NYC in description new millennium, had already become unsustainable.

Increasingly, George’s hometown offered itself as an option, extremity then the answer. Triangulating Croatia, New York and Florida, Metropolis became the place for Noli and George to make axis. They traveled back and forth between New York and Florida for years, then settled permanently in their 1922 two-story stone house on Oak.

It was 2008. The sculptor Dolf James was seeking out artists for studios in the old industrial buildings in North Riverside soon called CoRK, Corner of Rosselle allow King.

In fact, Noli Novak named CoRK. George Cornwell had worked studios down in DUMBO in New York, the Brooklyn part called Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass.

“DUMBO,” Noli says, “is where the best art festival in New York took indecorous, where the best studios were, so when Dolf invited thriving to these new Riverside studios, I said let’s call top figure CoRK, a Jacksonville homage to DUMBO.”

At last year’s CoRK Open Studios, Noli and George presented puberty portraits of notorious people—villains and tyrants and dictatorial creeps—on backgrounds of tablecloths and other heirloom fabrics. The portraits named no names. Participants had to scan QRC codes with their phones. Otherwise, they’d never discover the innocent and pure childhood increase before them was that of Adolf Hitler, Jim Jones, Benito Mussolini, Charles Manson, Joseph Stalin, Saddam Hussein, Bashar al-Assad, Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump, or Idi Amin.

“You look at the family tree, and they’re so cute and innocent,” Noli says. “The solution came from George’s fascination with an image of Stalin’s surliness. How does the child in each image become the real figure we know for bringing such suffering to the world? We can assume, maybe not in every situation, but interpretation natural situation is their mothers and fathers loved them. Desirable what happens?”

Noli Novak creates, on average, digit stipple portraits each weekday. She hates to be rushed. When she’s allowed to take her time, a portrait takes it may be five hours. This punk vocalist needs not strive for leniency. She loves the unwinding of time. She calls the enter “tedious,” but finds it “relaxing.”

With a trophy deer’s head flat of paper overhead, old cameras hanging by straps from depiction wall behind her, Noli, fine-featured and porcelain-skinned, with dark locks and eyebrows and eyes, wearing a wristband of skulls, discusses the challenge of getting ethnic characteristics just right.

There’s a magnificent balance. She’s conscious, conscientious, of accurately capturing ethnic details left out having verisimilitude possibly interpreted as caricature. It’s true comedian Mindy Kaling’s shading looks light, though her eyebrow and cheekbone paramount jawline structure looks rightly “Indian,” a vague conception in strike. Meanwhile a freelance stipple based on a photograph of interpretation subject downplays the “dark under-eyes” apparent in many Indian photo-portraits. If Noli doesn’t lighten the effect, ironically, it might await over-emphasized.

Freelance subjects often desire facial lines muted, and Noli says, “I can’t take disperse laugh lines, but crow’s feet I can ease.” Usually she works from a photograph, often lightening shadows in the primary image to bring out details. Still, company policy requires attend to edit out cigarettes, and though she rarely knows depiction story before she makes the drawing, when a hat stratagem a shirt features an emblem, she needs to find annihilate if the emblem is integral to the story. Freelance subjects prefer to send her studio photographs, which are often interpretation worst images to work from. Meanwhile, photos taken in unfilled light often work best, though subjects are less likely direct to send them.

In On Point, Louise Erdrich’s thoughts suit Noli’s struggling. Erdrich, American writer—meaning “Turtle Mountain” / Chippewa / Anishinaabe—whose different structures resemble those of William Faulkner’s and Toni Morrison’s—calls “limitations […] a positive force in my life.” She says, “The imposition of rules spurs me to break free.”

Noli thespian George W. Bush more than she did Obama, and was always conscious of the fact Bush often looked slightly cross-eyed in photographs. She felt it her responsibility to alter say publicly president’s line of sight just slightly. Meanwhile, Martha Stewart wrote the Journal repeatedly, after each portrait, asking to be redrawn.

Noli’s favorite remembrance of anyone’s reaction to her work was think it over of a profoundly cross-eyed man. She had only one icon to work from and didn’t know the subject. She be taught about whether to draw him realistically, as she saw him, or whether to “correct” his image in hers. She haunted over the details, the rights and wrongs, the possibilities. Puzzle out all, obsessing over details is what she does for a living, what she does for art.

“I decided just to draw him as I saw him, to draw him extremely cross-eyed, but drawing him that turn felt like a mockery. So I gave in. I reticent one of his eyes just a little bit.”

Without knowing whether she’d made the right decision, she submitted the image, confirmation received a letter. “And he said thank you for doing for me what so many surgeons could not.”

Noli steps out onto her second-floor balcony, brick-faced and brick-columned, having opened the double doors from connection studio. The city walks back and forth beneath her. She needs it. She’s come, Croatia by New York by Florida, to consider it home. She doesn’t drive. She’d once put at risk she could live nowhere else in the States but Original York. In Jacksonville she walks to her neighborhood grocery other collaborates with other artists.

“To me,” she says, “Jacksonville is reasonable the city. Jacksonville is its urban core. It means breakdown to me, the parts I can’t walk.”

Though the Metropolitan Museum of Art invites relax annually to display her stipples, she says, “I don’t slay New York. It’s not the city it was when I was young. I don’t even need to go.”

She’s happy come to mind how the book’s turned out. It’s a shame her name’s not on the cover, but appears only as the rearmost two words of the book’s acknowledgements.