Noreen Rice

Noreen Rice (19 February 1936 – 23 March 2015) was an artist born in Belfast, Northern Ireland, UK. She exhibited for fifty years and worked in the US, France and Switzerland and her work is included in the United Nations collection.

Life Rice was born in Belfast in 1936. Her parents were Nell (born Hayes) and Johnny Rice. Her mother could sing and her father was a master mason. Her mothers singing brought in extra money after her father was posted overseas during World War Two. She went to Methodist College in Belfast and by the age of fourteen she was living in the family home with lodgers as her parents were in Africa where her father was working. A school friend said that all she ever wanted to do was draw. She regarded both Dillon and Campbell as her mentors and her work was of a similar surrealistic and primitive style.

Gerard Dillon and his sister, Mollie, had a property on Abbey Road in 1958. They let off part of the house to artist Arthur Armstrong and they let a flat to Noreen Rice and her brother Hal. Dillon and Rice would tour junk yards to find objects like leather and string that they included in their artwork. She had exhibited and had her work in notable collections including the United Nations. She was noted for only creating art when she wanted to, she had never conformed, Aeneas Bonner said in her obituary "Normality was a not a close acquaintance".

“Noreen Rice is an original . . . curious that her place in Irish painting is not higher than it is . . . certainly no other artist in the country can handle pastel on this scale . . . although she owes something to Chagall she is strikingly original and also quite strikingly Celtic. “

“...she seems almost a throwback to the early Living Art days, and even further back to the days of Jack Yeats and AE.” Brian Fallon, Art Critic, Irish Times

"Creativity has been described as pulling the pail up from the well, or of holding the end of the golden thread," she said. "Images for me are surprises which emerge of their own volition, invite the viewer to participate again in the collective subconscious."

The golden thread she grasped brought her to Hong Kong, London, Paris, Geneva and back to her native Ireland in a career spanning more than half a century. Her works hang in collections from Tokyo to the United Nations in New York.