Blurb

Adam Noonan paints in a distinctly Canadian style which is reminiscent of a Canada many of us wish to know. His vibrant colours harmonize two divergent worlds - the man-made and the natural worlds.
Born and raised in Windsor, Ontario, Noonan's first exposure to painting was with a few private art lessons as a young child. 40 years later he would take out his original paint-box and brushes and attend art classes in Toronto. Since 1991 Noonan has painted full time.

M.S.

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Blurb 2

Adam Noonan is a Victoria landscape painter specializing in local scenes. Born in 1940, Noonan came to painting and Victoria in mid-life. The former Torontonian trained in photography at Ryerson Polytechnic before launching a series of careers as fashion photographer, antiques importer and Bay Street investment broker. Noonan credits instruction from Toronto painter Tom Campbell as an important factor in moving to his current pursuit.

Noonan's recent paintings are familiar town scenes in Victoria, Vancouver and the area. Customarily he completes his views of cafés, shop fronts and verandahs on site in a single day. He adapts a method of the Group of Seven for making oil sketches outdoors on small wood panels. For Noonan, however, the outdoor sketch is the finished product. On location, Noonan sketches cool ultramarine over the warm ground. Then he builds up bright pigments -- thick in the highlights, thin in the shadows -- paying attention to both detail and areas of textured colour.

The result is an impressionist mode of anecdotal realism. Noonan admires Tom Thomson and the Group of Seven, especially Lawren Harris' Toronto street scenes. Like Thomson, a commercial design background underlies Noonan's confident structure and tonal design. Bright areas of saturated colour move the planes of pictorial space up to the painting surface. Light and dark contrasts emphasize contour and colour with a decorative play of form first seen in French Impressionism.

Noonan's scenes are uniformly hot, always painted in sunlight. As in some Group of Seven oil sketches, his terracotta ground intensifies warm hues and blue shadows. Out of a painting language once used to explore the tension of Canadian identity in wilderness, Noonan's peaceful urban scenes offer a moment of escape into warm light and colour.

Joan Richardson

Victoria, October 1999