Beneath The Falls, oil on panel
Quiet Glow, oil on board
Fran Noonan finds his primary inspiration in the American Tonalist painters of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Although technically a landscape painter, his paintings show an intention more to invoke sentiments or memories than to merely depict natural places. His 2016 exhibit at Oxford was aptly titled "Intimations," with its many Wordsworthian associations. Instead of fine landscape detail and minutely stippled effects, Noonan substitutes broad washes of color and scumbled application.
His focus is not panoramic but specific: a single tree, a copse, or small body of water, for example. And the light is not bright and ubiquitous. In his frequently back-lit images, the light seems to obscure as much as illuminate, leaving only broad outlines which loom monumentally in the encroaching darkness. His paintings invoke rather than describe and remind us at times of dream images. In addition to his being a visual artist, Fran is a classical pianist, and his paintings might best be described as "tone poems." They speak to a sensibility or a reality beyond the visible.
Lofty Passage, oil on board
Labyrinth, oil on canvas board
Luring Meadow, oil on board
Prices available on request