Art Photography: Meet Joni Noble
Everybody who works at a university hears about the “most beloved faculty” on campus. As colleagues of this most cherished professor, we all feel a little envy mixed in with our admiration. With Dr. Joni H. Noble–who is SO adored by her art student at The University of Louisiana Monroe and by all of her students on The Catalyst–we just flat out love her too and forgo the envy altogether. How could it be otherwise, when she combines in one brilliant and energetic self not just the keen and talented eye of the artist but also the human warmth we all want around us when we are trying to learn new things and master things we’ve learned but might not yet be great at. Now in her own words…
Hello fellow travelers! My name is Joni Noble and I am The Catalyst professor who leads the art/photography classes ShutterSPEED and MuptipleEXPOSURES. Without a doubt, the most exciting thing I do all year long is The Catalyst. My regular job is in the Fine Arts Department at the University of Louisiana Monroe where I teach drawing, design, and art education. I also teach painting and photography privately. In fact, my whole adult life has been pretty much devoted to the arts and to dreaming about (and only later on actually experiencing) the wide world of travel. So how did I get to where I am now?
Well it took time, of course, to become a busily engaged professional art photographer. I went to school (lots of it) and did everything I could to see things in new ways and increase my visual sophistication. All the while I took pictures, drew, painted and made a visual record of how I felt and what I saw as I lived my life. Like anyone who has lived as a professional artist, I struggled mightily at times to balance what I’d wanted for myself as an artist, a human being, a mother and a professor.
This balancing act meant that I put some of my dreams on hold while “life intervened.” For me, this meant that I incubated as a traveler for many years while my career and family got served first. As much as I flourished in those years, this hadn’t been my first plan. On the contrary, I’d made the decision my senior year of high school to backpack across Europe with my friends for the summer. I remember still how excited at the thought of this voyage. I planned everything out — the countries I wanted to go to and the museums I would visit. All the photographs I would take, every single day of the trip that–in my mind–would surely be the adventure of a lifetime. Well…that summer came and went, and the plans for my trip were set aside. Instead, I started college and then let life take over. I met a man, we got married and then started a family. Twenty years came and went, and I’d still not become the traveler I had always dreamed of being.
One miraculous summer, I found a program that allowed me to start making my dream come alive. It was via a photography workshop with the internationally famous photographer, Elizabeth Opalenik, for two weeks of 24–7 living and learning southern France. Places I had always wanted to see in Provence–like Cannes, Monte Carlo and Nice–were in one summer where I made my home and took my pictures. I had finally made it overseas, and it was everything I’d hoped it would be. The experience changed the course of my artistic career and broadened my creative vision in such a dramatic way that I realized almost immediately my new goal as a professor was very simple indeed: to see it it that that every art student I worked with would get a relentless push from me to travel, to see, to learn and to do and to photograph NOW. What is my mantra–as an artist, a professor and a world traveler? It’s simply this: Come on The Catalyst and make art with some amazing students and me over here! You’ll never forget the beauty of what we do.
