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 Orange Orange Snow Field (1989)oil on wood, 12"x12"

Joan Snyder

 

JOAN SNYDER says there is a political painting ``brewing'' somewhere inside of her. It's not surprising. She has painted them before. But you can tell by the way that she says it that she has something to say about something going on right now. Something that needs to get said. Looking at her work, you can tell that her passions wouldn't allow her to stay quiet for very long. Sooner or later everything in her finds itself in paint.

 

There is a kind of order to these paintings. A mysterious natural order. If you could put the pieces together some secret of nature would be told. To experience her work is to cross a threshold, and enter another world. It is a place weighted with emotions, tuned to color and mark, the air thick with sounds.

 

Joan Snyder paints landscapes, of a sort. Landscapes of an abstract mind. She considers them to be more and more directly inspired from nature. After that her major influence is music. Like a heated conversation, they come together to shape her work.

 'This Sacred Field' (1989)oil,velvet,and metal spikes on wood,91x198cm.

 

Nature gives grounding to her art, sometimes literally through color and texture.The music is more about a structure, bringing order to the "sounds'' which rise from that landscape. There is also something lofty about the musical half, the geometric counterpart which frames the work. As complementary as this structural element is, Snyder treats it roughly to keep it from being too detached, too "not of this earth. " She actually pins it down.

 

The oil paint gets scraped and slabbed onto wooden surfaces, and the physical handling of it is almost savage. Then there are the bits and pieces of things Snyder picks up on walks near her home in Brooklyn, New York. These natural objects play into the work as a form of collaboration, a physical proof of a critical bond with nature. They bring a story all their own, and get nailed to the surface, along with iron, what she calls her ``rusties,'' and cloth, especially velvet. The velvet takes paint in a wonderful way, stiff and dry, a luxuriously deep, moist surface. Velvet has light in it. Light that reflects through the paint like the sun through leaves.

 

Joan Snyder admits that she doesn't like the way the media trivializes her painting by catagorizing it as "emotional,'' as Expressionism. She would prefer that her work was viewed more in terms of its formal and abstract merit. That's understandable, given that emotions are so often perceived as a sign of weakness, as besides the point. At the same time it is precisely this willingness to share her emotional intensity, honestly, and without indulgence, that gives a rare power and depth to her paintings. Her work is hardly just emotional. It is solidly, affirmatively, resoundingly emotional. These paintings bleed. It is those emotions which not only give the earthy music of these compositions their strength and conviction, they also make it ring truth.

Addison Parks, November 15, 1990, Courtesy The Christian Science Monitor; Photographs courtesy The Nielsen Gallery, Boston


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