​     As  a child, I added paper Mache to the florals in my paint-by-number kits to make the flowers "come alive." This desire to "enliven" my paintings stayed with me during my schooling where my medium of choice was spackling wall paste. Today in my practice, I count on various heavy pastes, sands, paper towels, acrylic skins and other texturizing mediums and applications  to furnish this breath.  With an homage to color, I seek a cinematic experience for each of my paintings that encourages the viewer to wander inside, peak through the layers, and relate on their own viseral level. 

 

Fran Mann Goodman began her formal education with a major in fashion design and illustration at Chouinard Art Institute, only to be told by her professor Robert Chuey after taking a painting class as an elective, that she was born to paint. She switched her major to fine arts and painting in representational style, was invited to exhibit her works in galleries and furniture showrooms in Los Angeles. 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 photo shoots in international magazines and on billboards. Working in the industry, she learned that even aesthetically beautiful 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 and was featured on national talk shows, radio, in women’s magazines and The New York Times. ​During those years, she did not paint. Instead, she wrote a memoir and two screenplays centered around her personal story and her mission to empower women to value their faces and 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 and paint in the style of abstract expressionism. 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 taught classes in abstract expressionism at the Morris Museum in Morristown, New Jersey.

     A resident of southern Florida since 2016, Goodman is the former educational fund chair for the Delray Art League and former co chair of the art program for the Boca Raton branch of the National League of American Pen Women. , Currently she is the scholarship coordinator of the National Association of Women Artists, Florida chapter. An award-winning artist, her paintings richly layered and textured have appeared in over fifty exhibitions in New Jersey, Toronto, Manhattan, and Southern Florida, and are in private collection internationally.  A sought-after speaker and workshop leader, Goodman has taught both online and in-person classes in various locations in Palm Beach County including at Old School Squares’ Creative Art School in Delray Beach. She has written numerous essays about the techniques of her craft that attracted the local media and has been featured in several Florida publications, including Delray Magazine (March/April 2023) and Boca Magazine (September/October 2023).

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