Lisa Noonis' TIDAL at the Banks Gallery

Painter Lisa Noonis, who's a friend of mine, has hit it out of the park with a new series of beach-based paintings being exhibited in a show opening this Thursday (August 27, 2015) at Portsmouth's Banks Gallery.

The paintings (in oil) are large, semi-abstract evocations of the oceanside - sometimes overcast, sometimes that summer saltwater ritual close to my own Long Island-born heart, the proverbial "beach day." But they are never conventional or cliche.

I've admired Lisa's work for as long as I've been painting. Her work has tons of vitality, and it's very evocative for me - I connect right to it (she consciously paints in an "open" way, suggesting rather than declaring or describing with unnecessary detail, an approach that invites the viewer to complete the picture). Her work is wonderfully painterly - she revels in the material, the textures and colors of paint. She often constructs volumes in her paintings with color changes rather than shading, applying lush brushstrokes in patches, somewhat in the manner of Cezanne. 

Lisa and I found ourselves in a master class with Eric Aho some time ago, and since then we've been toying with a similar landscape painting process. The idea is to mount a "campaign" on a particular place (in Lisa's case, it's the beach), the first stage of which is to paint in front of the motif every day, en plein air. 

The second stage is to again paint the motif in the studio, but this time from memory, on a much larger scale, and with the goal not of painting what it looked like but what it felt like; that is, to paint imaginative equivalents, rather than pictures of, nature. This approach has the advantage of comprehending the innovations of modernism and abstraction. 

I wrote the essay for the catalogue that accompanies Lisa's show. I love these beach paintings -- I think they're Lisa's best work to date and my favorite of the many paintings of hers that I've enjoyed (I'm happy to say I own three small originals). 

The show's up through September, 2015, and the essay text that I wrote is online here, at The Banks Gallery blog

Clyfford Still

1962-D by Clyfford Still

Clyfford Still's large abstract canvases initially predated the abstract expressionism of Rothko and Pollock, between which Still occupies a middle ground. His uncompromising work is about pure experience at its elemental extreme, the profundity of a Rembrandt stripped of imagery. 

He shunned fame and stated in his will that his 2,000+ paintings be kept under lock and key for 40 years after his death and then shown publicly only if a museum, without a cafe or a gift shop, could be built with the sole purpose of  housing them. That museum was built in Denver just four years ago (2011).

Most of Still's paintings, executed in palette knife and all untitled, reflect a stylized iconography of veils or flames in which everything trivial, personal, or transitory is smothered or burned away. In the above painting a jagged red shape not unlike a sun butns either in front of or behind ragged black and white veils.

“I hold it imperative to evolve an instrument of thought which will aid in cutting through all cultural opiates, past and present, so that a direct, immediate, and truly free vision can be achieved. . .and I affirm my profound concern to achieve a purpose beyond vanity, ambition, or remembrance.”  — Clyfford Still

"Thus all concentrates....Let us stun and astonish the intruding rabble of men and books and institutions by a simple declaration of the divine fact." -Emerson