Bendix Profile - Noel Alumit and Alan Joseph Marx
In room 546 you’ll find two artists sharing a space. Noel Alumit and Alan Joseph Marx were kind enough to take some time at our latest Bendix Open House on March 24th to talk about their works and what inspires them.
My name is Noel Alumit and I did my BFA at University of Southern California and I received a master's in Divinity in Buddhist Chaplaincy at University of the West. These are part of a new series I started on meditation actually. I work off of photographs I take myself and I'm hoping to build larger pieces to explore what meditation means. Right now, some of the colors are auric, meaning aura, to explore that event. I think they'll be bigger and show more of a mindset of what the paintings would be. A lot of the work I do actually stems from chronic loneliness, which I've experienced since I was a child.
That's why I have a lot of portraits and I take a lot of pictures, I feel like it sort of makes instant company. I'm always out and about, but at the same time, I also enjoy my solitude, obviously. As a meditation teacher and a person who works in the field of Buddhism, that stillness can be a really important skill in life and in creativity.
My name is Alan Joseph Marx, and what you're seeing here is a series I started mid 2016, and it has evolved into the title “Some Monsters are Real”. It's looking at the grotesque or the uneasy, but also the beautiful. My intention was to just reconnect with my drawing practice. I wanted it to be quick and immediate, not precious, which is why I invested in these index cards. I have hundreds of these drawings. Some stuff on moleskin and then paintings on paper, canvas, and wood. I love to use reclaimed wood, which is what most of these are. It's an exploration of the imagination and the grotesque. I've been doing a lot of writing about this over the past couple of months, and, and it occurred to me that this started and coincided with, you know, Donald Trump taking power. I don't think I was conscious of that at the time, but now that I'm looking back, I'm like, “Ah, it's all falling into place.”
When, the hurricane happened in Puerto Rico, I had hundreds of these, so I did a fundraiser and sold a lot of these drawings. I raised about $900 just selling them, which was nice. I'll be working on this for the next couple of years. I have a huge canvas that's the length of this entire wall, which is 18 feet. My goal is to make that the centerpiece for all of this work. I have a little bit more research to get done, before I actually start making marks on that but it was nice to get this all up on the wall and to be able to see it and get my thoughts clearer.
Learn more about Noel and Alan here:
@noelalumit
@alanbeingalan
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