Landscapes with Icing on Top Joan Snyder’s My August
Mia Matthias, Joan Snyder
In 1966, artist Joan Snyder wrote in her MFA thesis: “I am interested in forms, colors, shapes…. I am also interested in people, nature, the nature surrounding people and the people surrounding nature. I know that landscapes have overtones of human presence, and perhaps vice versa. I know love, hate, anxiety, fear, and humor. My paintings and sculpture invariably mention all of these things. I bring all of these beliefs to my altar and ask that it not be explained too logically.”
Sixty years later, on the occasion of the presentation of her work My August (2023) at MoMA as part of the Hyundai Card First Look series, Snyder generously sat down with us to reflect on her expansive career and densely layered artworks. Snyder fills her artworks with symbolic references and experimental materials, drawing on the range of human experiences and natural environment she declared her inspiration at the outset of her career. The resulting dynamic paintings fulfill her early goals of conveying the ways we connect to nature—and each other—that transcend language.
—Mia Matthias, Assistant Curator, Department of Painting and Sculpture
Mia Matthias: I would love to hear you speak about Sweet Cathy’s Song, a large-scale painting in MoMA's collection, and the circumstances around creating the work in 1978.
Joan Snyder: There’s so much to say about Sweet Cathy’s Song. As you can see, I’ve included children’s art in the painting. In 1978 I was teaching part time with an anti-poverty program in [Brooklyn’s] Bedford-Stuyvesant. I was working with kids who were having trouble in school. Many were struggling with math and reading, and I felt that art was another language they could speak. I was very against having a classroom where on Thanksgiving we make turkeys and on Christmas candy canes. I wanted them to use art to express their feelings and thoughts. One day after class I collected piles of their drawings, which they generously gave me to use in paintings I wanted to make at the time.
My then-husband, Larry Fink, and I were teaching one summer at Yale Norfolk where we met a young woman named Cathy, who was on the spectrum, likely autistic. We fell in love with her and that’s how the painting came to be called Sweet Cathy’s Song. I was working with grids at the time and so I took the kids’ drawings and put them into a grid and played around with it. I was painting with them, drawing on top of and embellishing their work with my own, and that’s really what this painting is all about—me and them. It’s lined across the top with totems. I had a late miscarriage in 1977, which was devastating for me. I was always very involved in the idea of the collective unconscious. After the miscarriage my totems began appearing in my paintings. I never knew what that was about until I read that totems can be symbols of death, symbols of loss.
My paintings are almost always personal. They can be political, they can be feminist, but, in the end, I consider myself a landscape painter in a lot of ways. You know, landscape with icing on top.
“Landscape with icing on top” might be the best thing I’ve heard in many weeks.
I’ve never said that before, by the way! I do think I’m a landscape painter, incorporating lots of stories. For example, I was looking through my sketchbook, trying to figure out where exactly My August came from, and it really relates to a lot of paintings I was doing at that time. I was very involved in bodies of water and ponds. I also made paintings with what I called seedcatchers in them, pieces of burlap filled with dried berries or seeds or plastic beads. And then I began thinking that I wanted to make paintings with soulcatchers, because I make a lot of paintings dealing with the idea of the soul and with memorials. Then I read how Northwest Pacific Indians made objects they called “soulcatchers” to capture and save souls. That was exciting.
My August is part of that soulcatcher series. The painting didn’t just happen. It developed over many years. It also contains small ink drawings of the female figure, something I tend to do in a landscape. It’s got a white pond, it’s got a moon, strokes...but it’s kind of a strange palette for me, when I look at it. It’s not an agonizing painting, as my paintings can sometimes be. There’s not a big black pond. It’s light. And even though, to me, it ends up being a very serene painting—very peaceful and kind of quiet, compared to a lot of my work—it didn’t necessarily come from peace and quiet.
