​     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 give life to the flowers.  Goodman continued to enliven her paintings at Chouinard Art Institute (CAL ARTS) in the mid '60s with the use of heavy wall paste.  Trained in the style of representational art, she was invited to exhibit several of her pieces at the Iron Butterfly Gallery in south 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 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. She designed a makeup system reflective of what she learned at Chouinard,, focusing on creating color stories that enhanced a woman's given coloring, speaking in the language of art.  She promoted her beauty philosophy of facial acceptance through her own story. Her 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 and 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 was featured in several Florida publications, including Delray Magazine (March/April 2023) and Boca Magazine (September/October 2023), and most recently awarded Volunteer of the Month by the Florida chapter of the National Association of Women Artists. Fran's painting, Bow to Mother Nature is on exhibit at the Art Gallery in Palm Beach International Airport until May 2025. 

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