SEAN NOONAN

Based in Kingston in New York’s Hudson Valley, Noonan builds his pictures directly on reclaimed boards and salvaged papers—materials often found nearby and embraced for their inherent history. Grain, knot, and warp guide the first marks; successive layers of oil, enamel, and graphite open pockets of light or deepen them in density. His dialogue is literally brush‐to‐board—a negotiation between gesture and given surface.Noonan’s paintings respond to intuitive impressions—gestures, rhythms, and visual fragments that surface through observation and recall. With a markedly present touch, his mark-making remains deliberately unfastened and free, summoning early, crude forms that carry weight, emotion, and personality. These forms resist direct reference yet feel rooted in a shared, archetypal visual memory. His motifs exist in a fluid state, anchored through methods and traditions of historical painting—echoing the way handwriting becomes unique through repeated use.There is a quiet seascape sensibility in Noonan’s work—his palette and compositions subtly evoke the elements of sea, sky, and stone. This affinity is also informed by Noonan’s passion for sailing, a practice that mirrors his studio approach—navigating changeable conditions, embracing chance, and responding to elemental forces with attention and restraint. In the exhibition, a folded 1956 sailcloth echoes these themes—a found object marked by weather and use, shown on a plinth. This resonance connects with the ethos of the St Ives modernists, where clarity and omission were guiding principles. As Ben Nicholson wrote in Circle (1937), “great painting strives for ‘clarity and the great art of omission,’” an ambition Noonan revisits through the tactile contingencies of weathered wood and elemental form.Each work is a small gem—intimate in scale, yet expansive in feeling. His sensibility draws from Abstract Expressionism and European modernism, yet remains firmly rooted in a contemporary, personal idiom. The individuality of each work is reinforced by Noonan’s use of evocative and poetic titles—such as King Ivo, Wire in Blue, Once a Place for Quiet, Orange Talisman, Last Week’s Neutrals Two, and More from the Old Ship—which act as tonal cues or fragments of thought, guiding interpretation without prescribing it. These titles suggest inner states, memory traces, and atmospheres of space and sound, gently anchoring abstraction in lived experience.

Noonan is a graduate of Pratt Institute and has exhibited nationally and internationally, with recent exhibitions at MARC STRAUS (New York), Devening Projects (Chicago), LKIF Gallery (Seoul), Resort (Baltimore), Galleri Kai (Copenhagen), Poker Flats (Williamstown), and SOHO Review (London). He is represented by Sears Peyton Gallery (New York) and Richeldis Fine Art (Spain/UK). Public collections include Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art, New Paltz, as well as numerous private and institutional collections in the United States and Europe.