LISA NOONIS - "BALANCING ACT" - SOLO EXHIBITION CATALOGUE

LISA N OON IS

B AL ANCING ACT

Cover Image: Pears and Hosta, 2019 Mixed media on canvas 56x48 inches

LIS A N OON IS

B A L A N C IN G A C T

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Balancing Act, 2019 Mixed media on canvas 24x24 inches

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IN TR OD U C TION

by Christopher Volpe

It’s tempting to locate Lisa Noonis’ latest body of work between axes of intimacy and chaos. Tempting but misguided, because the boundary lines never stop moving.

The subjects in Balancing Act may be the traditional ones of landscape, still life, and figure, but the paintings are not representations so much as amalgams of experience, intuition, and idea. Objects and figures interpreted as color and mark take their places in relationship with each other relative to the artist and the viewer. Inner oscillates with “out there.” Balance and disorder remain in flux.

A landscape like Cloud Over Water 7 (page 11) boldly flattens space into simplified and lusciously colored gestural shapes while retaining certain natural qualities of the scene, such as the cloud’s rounded forms and the flashes of blue-green lights and shadow from the water’s depths. The result is a distillation of memory and perception into abstraction at once purposefully unstable and exquisitely balanced, the chaos of experience at equilibrium. Such paintings can only be made intuitively.

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The result is work with honesty and vulnerability, visual constructions that can affect the viewer with the intimacy of poetry. In this sense Noonis’ paintings fit Robert Frost’s explanation of “the figure a poem makes” in which he wrote that “it begins in delight and ends in wisdom...in a clarification of life – not necessarily a great clarification, such as sects and cults are founded on, but in a momentary stay against confusion.” Noonis’ paintings are just such “momentary stays” against bedlam, place markers for the incomprehensible nature of life.

In paintings such as On A Clear Day (page 12) or Umbrellas 2 (page 13), color relationships play an outsized role. In the beach day depicted in the former, a vast, ultramarine blue ocean occupies the center of the canvas. Scattered around its edges, humanity celebrates the day in bright bursts of cadmium orange, yellow, and viridian. These colors reappear, as if reflected, in the cloud above, to complete a wreathe of carnival-like color that rings the sea. In the still lifes, warmish ochres and cool, complex blue- and lavender-grays harmonize with subtle warm and cool, clean and dirty whites. And here again “the idea of finding the middle and losing the middle, attaining balance and losing it, playing it safe and taking risks – these are all in the work.”

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the sudden high-intensity hues –

Lemonade, 2019 Mixed media on paper mounted to panel 48x36 inches

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The Conversation, 2019 Mixed media on canvas 24x30 inches

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cadmiums

and

chartreuse

greens

describing a flower, a vessel, a mango – dramatically destabilize the play of carefully modulated, muted harmonies.

“the intimacy of a still life is felt between the objects. a slight lean, one thing pressing on another. these things happen naturally. you just have to be awake to see it.�

The fresh and vigorous feeling in this work is partly a result of how it was made. Intent on freeing her muse from learned habits, Noonis for this series turned away from standard-sized canvases and hung sheets of prepared paper along the length of her studio wall. Within this boundless surface, she applied a range of media, often with her non-dominant hand. Her materials included acrylics applied with big brushes then misted with water and wiped with rags, collaged paper and canvas, including pieces of discarded paintings, and marks etched into wet paint with graphite pencils. Later she selected, mounted, and finished organically self-contained sections into the final paintings.

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Noonis’ treatment of the figure magnifies the sense of vulnerability that underlies many of these paintings, in which disorder is welcomed in and allowed to stay. Working off poses familiar from Western art and unfettered by a too-literal focus on form, Noonis inscribes through line, color, and abstraction, a complex fusion of psychology, sexuality, inner life, outer appearance, and foiled cultural expectations for depictions of the female body.

The feeling is indeed that of a balancing act. At stake is personal identity and the impulse to illuminate the flux of psyche and world. Painting for this artist is a way of taming the chaos of everyday experience, but with the kind of order that ultimately invites the chaos back in and holds it, rendering it livable. When we view paintings like those in Balancing Act, we sense and see a way of making a temporary truce with the untidy nature of reality, of neither “my approach to the figure considers vulnerability. while it’s uncomfortable there is an opportunity to grow. to feel the feeling of being uncomfortable and to allow it.”

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denying nor accepting fully the gorgeous “messiness” of life. This is art that can help us to live.

Rhapsody, 2019 Mixed media on canvas 36x48 inches

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“the landscape paintings were painted from memory of place. they aim to quiet visual and auditory chaos.�

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Cloud Over Water 7, 2019 Mixed media on paper mounted to panel 58x48 inches

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On A Clear Day, 2019 Mixed media on paper mounted to panel 32.5x25 inches

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Umbrellas 2, 2019 Mixed media on canvas mounted to panel 39x29 inches

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The Neighbor’s Swimming Pool, 2018 Mixed media on paper mounted to panel 36x24 inches

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Growing Up, 2018 Mixed media on paper mounted to panel 36x24 inches

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“my desire to be original requires solitude.�

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Solidarity, 2016 Mixed media on paper mounted to panel 46.5x41 inches

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“while the landscape is often depicted as we see it, i paint it as i feel it – from memory of space, sound, and chaos.”

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Working Waterfront Series 1-4, 2019 Mixed media on paper mounted to panel 84x20 inches

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Bend, 2019 Mixed media on canvas 48x36 inches

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Green Cashmere, 2019 Mixed media on canvas 36x36 inches

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Wake Me Up, 2016 Mixed media on canvas mounted to panel 57.75”x43”

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Amethyst, 2019 Mixed media on canvas 32x20 inches (diptych)

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Silken, 2019 Mixed media on paper mounted to panel 24x18 inches

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Bloom, 2018 Mixed media on paper mounted to panel 24x18 inches

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City On The River 2, 2019 Mixed media on paper mounted to panel 36x41 inches

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City On The River 3, 2019 Mixed media on paper mounted to panel 36x41 inches

“making the work is as important as the work itself. my aim is to allow my process to be seen and felt.�

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Curtain Call, 2019-20 Mixed media on canvas 36x48 inches

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“i’ve learned to trust my creative process.”

Catalogue ©Lisa Noonis, 2020

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