Roy Noakes was a British portrait and figure sculptor.
12 Facts About Roy Noakes
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Roy Noakes's achievement, driven by a refusal to be constrained by technique or bound by what he had learned, was based on his consummate skills as a craftsman.
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Roy Noakes was apprenticed aged fifteen to a firm of monumental masons, Anselm Odling, and 'learned to carve roses and angels'.
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In 1962 Roy Noakes was awarded a Beckwith Scholarship by the Worshipful Company of Fishmongers and travelled to Italy, where he studied the work of Giacomo Manzu and Medardo Rosso.
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Roy Noakes changed his indentures to Gerald Giudici, a master carver who executed large-scale public sculptures by Sir Charles Wheeler, Gilbert Ledward and James Woodford; at the end of a long tradition of figurative sculpture, these free-standing monuments and architectural reliefs represented for the 'modernist' Patrick Heron, 'spurious sentiment and meaningless skill'.
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Roy Noakes might have agreed, but the path he took in the 1960s related neither to the 'abstraction' of Anthony Caro, Phillip King or William Tucker, nor to the vestigial figurative tradition represented by John Davis or the mechanistics of George Fullard and Eduardo Paolozzi.
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Roy Noakes embarked on a fascinating and important journey in a very different direction.
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Roy Noakes worked outside the mainstream or avant-garde cultural orthodoxies of his time, neither a brutalist, a conceptualist, nor involved with smooth or shiny surfaces that were barriers to expressing the dynamic potential of his materials.
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Roy Noakes aimed to breathe life into clay or bronze, to break down the distance between sculpture and the human form it signified, almost as though blood was coursing through its veins.
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Roy Noakes was too serious about exploring his ideas to court popularity.
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Roy Noakes made a formal portrait bust of Sir Anthony Eden of which there are versions in the Houses of Parliament and the Foreign Office.
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Roy Noakes' commissioned portraits of Bernard Miles and Alan Rawsthorne are in the collection of the National Portrait Gallery in London.