Bozarts Gallery Hosts ‘Thawing Out’ Art Night Friday
Pannawat Thamutok, left, and Dane Noonan are featured on a postcard promoting Kitchen Confidential. The showing opens Friday night at Bozarts Gallery.
With the thawing of snow and ice and the return to more “normal” winter weather, Bozarts Gallery invites the community to an evening of art and music Friday, Feb. 6, from 6–9 p.m.
The event celebrates the strength and resilience of the community. Over the past week, leaders, linemen, neighbors and citizens across the Valley pulled together to overcome the icy crisis caused by winter storm Fern. Friday’s art opening is a “thawing out” and an opportunity to say thank you.
The exhibit Kitchen Confidential — inspired by the book by the late Anthony Bourdain, the American celebrity chef and travel writer — features two painters familiar with the professional kitchen environment: Dane Noonan and Pannawat Thamutok.
Noonan is a self-taught artist who grew up in Naples, Florida, and has lived in the Oxford–Water Valley area for the past 20 years. His work is rooted in close observation and a deep interest in how people inhabit the spaces around them.
Working primarily in oil, Noonan creates narrative portraits that place people within the lived environments of their daily lives. He combines impressionistic realism with subtle touches of the surreal to explore mood and the quiet drama of ordinary moments. Rather than staged poses, his work lingers in natural gestures and familiar settings, emphasizing presence over performance.
Thamutok works exclusively with thick oil paint applied straight from the tube using only palette knives. Rejecting brushes altogether, his process emphasizes immediacy, physicality and restraint, removing excess tools and detail to focus on perception itself.
His work explores how we see — how humans move through a three-dimensional world while actually perceiving it on a two-dimensional surface. By creating images that are “close enough” to reality, he invites viewers to reflect on how depth, form and meaning are learned over time.
