Even Joan Snyder Is Surprised That She’s Still Painting at 84 ‘I Mean, Who Does That?’

By Ella Martin-Gachot

Joan Snyder is a morning person. Whether she’s in Brooklyn or Woodstock, the 84-year-old artist wakes up at 5 a.m.—“if not earlier”—on any given day. She makes tea, eats breakfast, hangs out with her partner Maggie, a retired judge, and does the crossword puzzle. Then she heads to the studio. Sitting in her Upstate atelier, Snyder admits hers is a hermetic life. “The pandemic was perfect for me,” she adds with a laugh. “I didn’t have to go anywhere or see anyone. I could just paint every day with absolutely no interruptions.”

Art has been a solace for six decades. Before her Whitney Biennial inclusions, before her Guggenheim Fellowship, before selling out solo shows, Snyder was an anxious sociology student at Douglass College. Then she discovered painting. “It was literally like speaking for the first time,” she recalls. “I could say what I wanted to say.” The studio and the canvas are still a refuge: “This is [where] I feel best. I love making paintings—I love it more than doing almost anything [else].”

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Over the years, the art world has closely followed Snyder’s evolution from the abstract “stroke” paintings that made her name in the early ’70s to her embrace of maximalism and upending of the landscape genre in the decades since. Her work is in the collection of every major American museum and has been the subject of over 60 solo exhibitions. This winter, European audiences will get a formal introduction to her practice, with her first show with Thaddaeus Ropac on view in London through February 2025.

Most of the pieces on view are leaving Snyder’s archive for the first time. “We borrowed maybe three paintings altogether,” she explains. “The rest are from my collection.” After months of working on the newest canvases in the show, the artist decided to make another “crazy painting.” Beholding it in her studio, before it too shipped across the ocean, Snyder was happy to have leaned into its excess. “It’s overdone, but to me it’s just perfect,” she confesses, before continuing, “No one is more surprised than I am that I’m still making these paintings. I mean, who does that?"