A Conversation with Joan Snyder All That Glitters
By Jan Lohrmer
I had the good fortune to visit with painter Joan Snyder in her Brooklyn studio in January. She greeted me in paint-splattered clothes as we made our introductions and continued into her living room, where some of her historic paintings, prints, and drawings sparkled. We then proceeded out the back door and through the backyard, past a small fishpond, and into her studio. A renovated carriage house held ample work space and various tables ordered with jars, bottles, tubes, cans, brushes, and other tools for art-making. Several skylights diffused cool light over a series of freshly painted canvases. The new pieces conveyed her signature iconography: luscious fields of color, heavy impasto contrasted by areas of bare canvas, gestural brushstrokes bleeding drips of paint, and embedded mixed media. Various combinations of glitter, silk, dried flowers, earth, burlap, and more were layered beneath a medley of acrylic paints, gel mediums, oil paint, and oil sticks, and spoke in chorus along the studio walls.
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At the same time, Snyder’s pictorial language continues to combine elements of abstraction with autobiographical figurative and symbolic imagery. While her style is comparable to that of painters such as Anselm Kiefer or Robert Rauschenberg and their use of innovative materials and expressive surfaces, her content is more intimate and experiential—the palette is just plain prettier. She has mastered an elixir of sophisticated craft to tell her stories through musical references and rhythms of colors, visceral organic and synthetic means, and perfunctory inserts of automatic writing. Her practice is firmly rooted in the formal history and language of paint, yet catapults into the wild world of feeling.
A self-proclaimed “maximalist,” Snyder states that music fuels much of her inspiration, and cites composers such as Bach, Arvo Pärt, Nina Simone, Laurie Anderson, and Philip Glass as just a few of the formative influences for her rich and tactile paintings. Lately, Snyder has been listening to Anderson’s experimental work, which combines rhythmic sound, performance, and emotional narrative, drawing parallels to Snyder’s operatic paintings. She cites classical music as closely aligned to her process of choreographing composition. At times, a grid, like a musical staff, functions as an underlying structure on which to build up forms and relationships. In preliminary drawing studies, Snyder combines diary-like sketches and writing to unearth themes that may precede a painting by two to three years—she often attends concerts, sketchbook in hand. Classical novels provide additional inspiration and Snyder maintains they are not as difficult to read as people assume. She enjoys reading the works of authors such as Tolstoy, George Eliot, Flaubert, and Proust, discussing their work at a book club in Woodstock, New York, where she and her partner have a second home.
Snyder adheres to a rigorous painting routine, which begins early with intensive mornings in the studio. Music unlocks creative doors, which she explains are rarely blocked. “One thing leads to another,” she states succinctly, as is evidenced by a legacy of paintings that have evolved through five decades. Snyder has been making prints since the mid-’60s. In her typical exuberant style, she layers various print processes, such as lithography, etching, and woodblock, and often adds hand painting, pastel, and glitter. These techniques were on display in a retrospective exhibition at the Zimmerli Art Museum, Rutgers University, titled Dancing with the Dark: Prints by Joan Snyder, 1963–2010. This show, which ran from 2011 to 2012, showcased the artist’s experimental techniques, exploring in bold color themes of nature, intimacy, love, and violence. The comprehensive collection traveled to the Boston University Art Gallery, the University of Richmond Museums, and the University of New Mexico Art Museum. Joan Snyder graduated from the Rutgers University MFA program in 1966 and received almost immediate attention in the art world with a 1970 solo show in New York City of her signature stroke paintings. She has sustained a forceful presence ever since. While the ’60s and ’70s were dominated by art with a cool Minimalist, geometric style, Snyder’s work embraced qualities from German Expressionism infused with personal narrative and symbolism.
As Pop and Minimalist movements defined the continuation of a male-dominated art world in the mid-’70s, Snyder, along with other women, was making art that was autobiographical, political, visceral, and overflowing with experimental materials. She explains in Joan Snyder (Abrams, 2005), in an essay written by Hayden Herrera, that the style, originally dismissed as feminist art (then a dirty word), was appropriated by male artists and came to be known as Neo-Expressionism, the defining style of the 1980s.
