All of the young British sculptors who emerged in the 1960s had to engage with the towering international reputation of Henry Moore, and with the associated fallacy that direct carving was congruent with modernity. But at least the weight of Moore’s eminence was a crucial factor in provoking a reaction, and Roy Noakes explored ideas that, while they shared his over-riding concern with the human form, were only marginally connected to Moore’s investigation of volume, scale and space. Noakes embarked on a fascinating and important journey in a very different direction.

In fact Noakes dedicated his life to evolving an alternative sculptural language, one concerned with transience and lightness, to conveying fleeting appearances and gestures with the greatest economy of means, pared down, that is, in the sense of needing to eliminate everything that was extraneous to the inner energy of his forms. He worked, in short, outside all of 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.

Noakes’s surfaces were active, not static. He 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. In more than forty years of widely varied work, there is a common thread in that it all looks alive – extemporised, spontaneous. However great was his struggle with intransigent substances, the viewer is not conscious of it.

The art world was in a rush in the 1960s, and with the privileging of ‘the new’, innovations were confidently hyped that have proved alarmingly transient, the great ideas depressingly hollow. Noakes was too serious about exploring his ideas (as well as temperamentally indisposed) to court popularity: although his work was publicly exhibited, and he had a circle of loyal and avid admirers, he never achieved the broader recognition he was due. 

Fortunately, the core of his work remains to ensure that the art-historical record can now be put straight. Anyone privileged to have seen Roy Noakes’s sculpture in his studios has witnessed the physical embodiment of a life devoted to art, and it is wonderful that his heroic project will be celebrated once again.

Noakes became a modeller by what was paradoxically the most efficient route – through his training as a carver. His 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.

He was born in Stepney in 1936, and although as a dyslexic he was unresponsive to formal education in the local secondary school, he was encouraged to draw by his father (who died when he was twelve). He was, fortuitously, apprenticed aged fifteen to the monumental masons, Anselm Odlings, and ‘learned to carve roses and angels’. He also attended evening drawing classes at the City & Guilds of London Institute, Kennington, where among the teachers was the sculptor Bernard Sindall, who, crucially, introduced him to the work of Giacomo Manzu and Medardo Rosso. If his work sometimes invites comparisons, the unfinished sculptures of Michelangelo, Manzu’s reliefs and Rosso’s emotive impressionism were his chief inspirations.

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’. Noakes might have agreed, but the path he took in the 1960s related neither to the ‘abstraction’ of Anthony Caro, Philip King or William Tucker, nor to the vestigial figurative tradition represented by John Davies or the mechanistics of George Fullard and Eduardo Paolozzi.

After National Service in the Middle East he returned full time to study at City and Guilds Institute (1958-62), making brilliantly animated figures in a burst of creativity pent up during his enforced two-year absence. Subsequently his career can be seen in terms of evolving a personal expressive language through modelling. And even in the most ostensibly passive of his late high-reliefs, in which the female figures have an almost fin-de-siecle dolorousness, there is energy and a snap-shot immediacy.

In a gesture that was typical of the man and his commitment to sculpture Noakes made, latterly, just one formal portrait, to show he could model ‘look like look’ and to get it out of his system; this was a bust of Sir Anthony Eden (1996) of which there are versions in the Houses of Parliament and the Foreign Office. Also commissioned portraits of Baron Miles of Blackfriars and Alan Rawsthorne are in the  National Portrait Gallery collection other portraits capture their sitters’ spirit but make no concessions to traditional modelling). He continued to offer us the intangible and the elusive made forcefully but elegantly plastic.

Martin Harrison