Artist Bethany Noël

Melisma (2024), 48″H x 36″W, acrylic, chalk pastel, and white gesso on canvas.

Northern Kingdom (2017), 48″H x 48″W, acrylic and black gesso on canvas.

Backyard Roses (2023), 30″H x 30″W, acrylic, chalk pastel, and white gesso on canvas. Backyard Roses (2023), 30″H x 30″W, acrylic, chalk pastel, and white gesso on canvas.

The Fells (2021), 40″H x 30″W, acrylic, chalk pastel, and black gesso on canvas.

Blood Orange (2023), 36″H x 36″W, acrylic, chalk pastel, and white gesso on canvas.

Cemetery Leaves (2023), 36″H x 36″W, acrylic and black gesso on canvas.

Over Troubled Water (2021), 36″H x 36″W, acrylic, chalk pastel, and white gesso on canvas.

Bethany Noël in her Holliston, Massachusetts, studio. Portrait by Hilary Casavert

In the summer of 2014, Bethany Noël was fed up, she says, “with bad bosses, bad roommates, bad landlords, and bad relationships.” She had lost her job and her apartment and suffered from chronic migraines, a condition she’s endured since age ten that gives her ocular auras, persistent vertigo, and pain so constant that, on a scale of one to ten, a five is a good day.

After two weeks spent collapsed on her sister’s couch, she realized that she was also free to do what she wanted, “which was to be a hermit and go paint in the woods.” Through a connection at Reed College, where she’d spent two years as a premed before getting a free ride to the Rhode Island School of Design, she rented an old, unheated farmhouse on 150 acres in Glover, Vermont.

For years Noël had wanted to communicate how she experienced the therapeutic effects of the outdoors through her migraine-altered vision. “Normally,” she says, “your brain organizes what you see so you don’t focus on every stalk of grass. My brain gets stuck so that all that data is coming at me.”

This can be overwhelming but also beautiful. She had never been able to find a painting technique to match what she perceived—until she arrived in Glover. “I would wake up and read and paint and drink coffee and eat Ramen and do sketches” of the brambles, vines, and woods.“I felt like I was seeing every line of bark and every single leaf and their fluctuating colors, and it was interesting to go into that.”

When cold temperatures took hold, Noël moved back to Boston, found a new studio, and expanded those sketches into a masterwork she named Northern Kingdom, in homage to Glover. Black gesso, acrylic paints, and chalk pastels allowed her to create a representation not of reality but of a world that looked magical to her, one filled with clashing perspectives and pointillist vibrations. It was the foundation for most of her subsequent work.

“I try to bring joy through my paintings,” Noël says. “I’m choosing to see the beauty, which I hope also helps others to feel better.”

Editor’s note: Bethany Noël is represented by Three Stones Gallery in Concord, Massachusetts, threestonesgallery.com. To see more of her work, visit bethanynoelart.com.