Noel McKenna (b. 1956), artist, is best known for his spare linear style and paintings of everyday scenarios, often featuring animals and interiors. He grew up in Brisbane, where he studied architecture before switching to art school. In the late 1970s he moved to Sydney, living in share houses and using an office in an old Elizabeth Street building as a studio. As the garment trade evaporated in Surry Hills, he took studio space there. For much of the 1980s he worked by night at the Cosmopolitan Café and Twenty One in Double Bay. Horses have been central to his art from the beginning, inspired by trips to the races with his father. 'Being a painter is a bigger gamble than being a punter, in terms of getting a collect,' the artist once observed. His first solo exhibition was a show of etchings of horses, at the Garry Anderson gallery in Potts Point. In 1993 he began painting on ceramics in a commercial shopfront in Newtown, and the following year had a solo exhibition at Roslyn Oxley9 in Sydney – an assortment of horses painted on plates, with dainty dotted borders. He won the Sulman Prize in 1994 and has taken out the Art Gallery of New South Wales Trustees' prize for watercolour five times. Both the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art and the Art Gallery of New South Wales have shown major series by McKenna. Twenty of his works were shown in The Popular Pet Show at the National Portrait Gallery in 2016.
