Artful Joe enjoying his new post

Following almost 40 years of delivering letters in East Clare, Flagmount man Joe Noonan has received quite a different calling as he embarks on a new path in retirement, taking him from post to paint.

 

 

Following almost 40 years of delivering letters in East Clare, Flagmount man Joe Noonan has received quite a different calling as he embarks on a new path in retirement, taking him from post to paint.

In August 2008, Joe was accepted on the Bachelor of Arts degree programme at Crawford College of Art and Design (Cork) and LSAD (Limerick School of Art and Design).

This month, he graduated from the course with honours and with the Revenue Commissioners Award for Excellence shown during The Bachelor of Arts (Honours) Degree in Fine Art Painting.

“I have been a postman for many years, delivering mail in the region around Lough Graney. I’ve always been interested in art and I used to have a huge interest in drawing when I was going to school. I would draw on my books rather than studying them and I kept that interest,” Joe said.

He explained it was only when he “started on the post” that he began to discover his own place and cultivated his interest for the arts.

“I learned an awful lot from the older people. I started working as a postman in 1970 and I finished in 2008 when I took my career break. The main reason I took it was because I had an interest in art and growing up, my family would have been introduced to art and brought into art galleries in Dublin.

“All of my family, my wife and children, were encouraging me to go to art college. It was something I couldn’t achieve when our family were young. I was enjoying my work on the post and I actually left my job while I was still enjoying it. It was nice to try something else and because I have a flare for art, I decided to challenge myself. It was a challenge and it wasn’t easy to make that break,” he outlined.

There were days for Joe in college when it really was very difficult but he was determined to see it through and having come out the other side Joe said there was a great deal of satisfaction, especially in the last days.

“Before the graduation, when I knew I had come out with honours, I was very pleased that I had given it my best shot. I’m so glad I did it. I would encourage anybody to do it.

“If you do something all your life, and I had been a postman for all those years, to make the break. I made that break and I remember when I went for my interview, that day was just so different, a new life completely,” he said. 

While graduating with honours was an achievement in itself for Joe, he was bowled over to learn he was the recipient of the Revenue Commissioners Award for Excellence.

“I was glad that I had completed the course and was doubly delighted at receiving the Revenue Commissioners Award for Excellence. I was really blown away,” he said.

Indeed, this was not his first award, nor was it his first time dabbling in the arts. Already with two books to his name,  Songs, Recitations and Short Stories published in 1990 and 1992, printed by The Clare Champion, Joe also received the Young Environmentalist History Award in 1991.

Meanwhile, in 2000, he designed the Millennium Bell Tower, which stands in Flagmount and scooped yet another award, this time the Young Environmentalist Art and Architectural Design Award 2003.     

“They wanted to do something in our community for the millennium and our bell in the church was taken down when they were renovating the church, so it needed to be replaced.

“I didn’t have anything to do with it really but one man, Rodger Moloney, who was going to build it, wanted a plan and suggested, because I had a reputation for drawing, that they would ask me to draw the plan. I said I would design something myself and if they wanted to use that, they could.

“To replace the bell in the chapel yard, it was going to have some meaning and significance. The structure was built in the form of a candle and there’s a stainless steel top that houses the bell. It turned out very well,” he said.

Describing his college experience, Joe said he enjoyed the balance between mature students and younger students but found the continuous competitive environment gruelling at times.

“In the first semester, you do a bit of everything, such as design, painting, sculpting, print, fashion and ceramics. Having done that, I decided I wanted to do painting. All the way through, it is a competition to get into the painting class,” he said.

For his degree project, Joe returned to his formative years, reconstructing a typical schoolroom of the 1950s within a room of the college.

“You start with a white space in the room. I did mine in pencil, graphic pencil and drawing. I started with a bookcase and when the thing was completed I brought in some desks and put some of my own paintings on the walls.

“At the end of the day, it has to be an experience for the person who goes into it and has to feel like they are back in school. I had to document the project, computerise it and put it on a video, so it’s now a 20-minute video piece.

“It is about the experience and you had to make a statement about what school was like in the 1950s. When I was growing up, censorship was very much part of it, so I did a synopsis of 20 different books banned for different reasons. The typical one was The Country Girls by Edna O’Brien. In other countries, the same was happening and I documented each,” he outlined.

Speaking about the overall experience, Joe said in all his years of education this “was really the first time being in school and having enjoyed it”.

Having reached retirement age during his study at LSAD, Joe decided it was time to take a step back from the post to explore the art world.

“Now I have the freedom to do these things, I will go over to London to visit the galleries. I hope I will continue to interact with the college. I’ve a lot of projects I hope to do. I used to do cartoons and things like that, I’ll continue illustrations and I will definitely do some painting.

“My skills are more in drawing than painting but I have learned an awful lot about abstract art and that’s been fascinating, so I’m just going to experiment with work like that,” he concluded.