Fran Mann Goodman
"In my practice, I frequently employ the Chiaroscuro method. I am enchanted by the dimensional quality that results from blending areas of light and shadow with various mediums like pastes, pumice, acrylic skins, and paper towels. I often incorporate the palette knife as I find that the trifle amount of weight from the strokes adds an additional dynamism. I have an acute sensitivity to color and its nuances– how a subtle difference in a shade can change the gestalt of the piece; how colors themselves can produce cinematic and visceral characteristics.
I do not plan a painting, but as I work, I need to feel an emotional attachment to the piece. At the same time, I want to give the observer more than what they will see; a certain mystique; like an unfolding metamorphosis that says ,"something is going to happen and a story is going to be told."
When Fran Mann Goodman was a young child, before she would finish a floral paint-by-number, she would add strips of paper mache to the painting to “make the flowers come alive.” Goodman continued to enliven her paintings using heavy wall paste at Chouinard Art Institute (CAL ARTS) in California in the mid '60s. Trained in the style of representational art, she was invited to show several of her pieces at the Iron Butterfly Gallery in southern New Jersey along with other paintings in galleries and furniture showrooms in Los Angeles, California. After college, due to a childhood trauma with her face, Goodman shifted her interest from painting canvases to women’s faces.
At twenty-one, Goodman was the lead makeup artist at Betty Milne Modeling Agency in Toronto, a subsidiary of Wilhelmina Models. Her job was to prepare top models for shoots in international magazines and billboards. Working in the industry, she learned that even gorgeous women harbored facial inferiority complexes. This led to a 30-year career to inspire all women to appreciate their given beauty. Goodman devised workshops and support groups in the United States and Canada. She shared her personal story with women to promote her beauty philosophy of facial acceptance. This message spread on national talk shows, radio, women’s magazines and other publications including The New York Times. During those years, she did not paint. Instead, she wrote a memoir and two screenplays centered around her personal story to continue her mission to empower women to accept and value themselves.
In 2012, in the middle of inciting a Hollywood agent's interest in her second screenplay, Goodman contracted Lyme disease, which weakened her hands and affected her ability to write. Fighting a severe depression, she discovered she could hold a palette knife. This led to a series of master classes at the Art Students League with renowned abstract artist Larry Poons. Her works were shown in galleries in New York City. Goodman also was granted the opportunity to teach abstract expressionism at the Morris Museum in Morristown, New Jersey.
A resident of southern Florida since 2015, Goodman is the former Educational Fund Chair for the Delray Art League, Co-Chair of the Art Program for the Boca Raton Branch of the National League of American Pen Women, and Scholarship Coordinator of the National Association of Women Artists. She is an award-winning painter who values teaching others as much as exhibiting her own work. Her paintings have appeared in over forty exhibitions in New Jersey, Toronto, the Chelsea District of Manhattan, and Southern Florida, and are in private collection internationally. A sought-after speaker and workshop leader, she has taught in-person classes in various locations in Palm Beach County including at Old School Squares’ Creative Art School in Delray Beach. Currently she instructs an all level online course that blends art history with applications in abstract expressionism. Goodman has written numerous essays about the techniques of her craft that attracted the local media. She has been featured in several Florida publications, including Delray Magazine (March/April 2023) and Boca Magazine (September/October 2023).