Marian Noone Matt Leslie

WHILE those outside friends and family may not be able to pick out Marian Noone in the street, they will be well-acquainted with her art.

The Drumcliffe artist, currently residing and working from her studio in Bangor, Co. Down, has more than left her mark around Sligo town and beyond.

Commissioned by Sligo Tidy Towns to bring some colour to the area, a host of artistic murals have popped up all over the place in recent years.

Her work is identifiable by her signature, which is her nickname ‘Friz'. Marian's work has spread across Ireland (north and south) as well as far-flung climbs such as Mexico, Turkey, Colombia and, at the end of the month, Brazil.

Of her pseudonym, Marian says: “Friz is short for ‘Frizelle', a name I'd been using for a long time. I saw it written on a headstone in the graveyard – at Drumcliffe – where WB Yeats is buried.

“It sounds macabre but I spent a lot of time there as a child, it's a tourist spot and I grew up close by. The headstone actually says ‘Frizzelle' but I had remembered it wrong when I started using the name.”

Given her artistic upbringing, it is probably no surprise that Marian has taken the creative path and has brought colour to many a street wall with her world-famous murals.

“I grew up in a very creative household in terms of being encouraged and supported,” said the 40-year-old.

“So any art classes you wanted to go to, you were brought to. If you wanted to pick up an instrument, you were brought to classes.

“I did Irish dancing and violin but none of them really stuck – but art did.

“My parents were both creative but didn't pursue art themselves. My dad, Jimmy, worked at Sligo County Council until he retired while my mother Mary – who also worked at the Council for a while – was a draper making curtains and things like that.

“She also embroidered and made dresses. There's a ton of dresses from her 20s which she made herself.

“The bug for art more or less kicked in the minute I was able to pick up a crayon. If you see any of my old schoolbooks, they all have doodles in them. I remember in primary school drawing cartoon characters – be it Disney characters or Sonic the Hedgehog.

“Going into secondary school, I would have done art as a subject and I would go on to do art as a course at the VEC.”

A TV programme about cartoons that her mum watched would prove to be a life-changing experience for Marian who ended up going to Dublin to study animation.

She added: “It was my mum who encouraged me to pursue the course that I eventually did. Mum sadly passed away in 2001 but she went down with me to the open day in Ballyfermot, Dublin (for a course in animation) to check out the college and for both my interviews for Ballyfermot and Dun Laoghaire that year after encouraging me to apply for animation so she definitely set me down the path to where I have ended up now.

“With the course in Ballyfermot, a Nationwide special was on TV and they featured an animation course offered by the college and mum said to me, ‘is that something you would think about doing?'.

“I was like, ‘you mean I can draw cartoons for a living?'. So I applied to both colleges and was accepted by both – I chose Ballyfermot over Dun Laoghaire.

“The course was the old hand-drawn course – which is getting a bit of a revival now but the craft was dying a death back then. But everything I've done since 2001 – when I started the course – has stemmed from studying animation.

“In terms of how complex animation is, (award-winning cartoon comedy) South Park did an episode of how a show is made, showing what a painstaking process each shot is to make – and that was a simplified form of animation.

“Every cell is hand-drawn so this course was proper old-school animation. When I finished the course, I knew I didn't want to be an animator but now, it's come full circle as I've download Procreate Dreams onto my iPad where you can animate on your device or phone.

“It's more accessible but it's still a painstaking process – you need to love it.”

A further period of relocation then followed via Edinburgh and then Belfast where Marian got the break needed to make a full-time career from street art.

She said: “I moved to Edinburgh with my partner Gerry – just because we working a minimum-wage job in Sligo and felt we could be doing this somewhere else.

“I did the second year of an illustration course there at Telford College. That was to kind of get me drawing again because I was pretty burnt out and animation as an industry is very demanding.

“After that, we moved to Belfast where I was working part-time in an art shop – so I was getting my materials a little bit cheaper which was great. In 2008, I signed up to do a street art workshop at the Urban Arts Academy down at the Waterfront.

“It cost £50 so I told the boss I was taking that particular week off, went to the course and the rest is history. I've been freelancing for 12 years now.

“Drawing characters on a wall compared to 50 hours animating them is very preferable indeed.

“My freelancing evolved organically and got more and more work as I progressed to the point where I could go freelance full-time.”

Although based on the other side of Ireland, Marian does venture back to her roots when Tidy Towns has a job for her.

“I get to mix business and pleasure when I go down to Sligo,” she continued. “Sligo Tidy Towns have been great supporters of mural work. The murals – as everyone can see – have popped up over the years up and down Sligo.

“Tidy Towns are very forward-thinking – they were one of the first ones I started working with but I've done a few now in different towns and counties.

“When I get started on a mural, I'd say that 95 per cent of the comments I get from the public