Nick Sousanis on Facebook.
"Terribly
saddened to hear the news about Gilda Snowden today. My thoughts are
with her family and the Detroit arts community for such a tremendous
loss.Wanted to share two past things from my experience of Gilda -
first, her interview from the Why exhibition we put on at
Work:Detroit:
http://whyproject.blogspot.com/2007/11/gilda-snowden.html
"My
name is Gilda Snowden. I’m a painter. I paint many things. I paint
pictures of tornadoes, flowers, chairs, lots of things. I mainly
work with encaustic, a wax paint from antiquity.
I do this because
they make me happy. I do this because I’m obsessed. I paint, I take
photographs, and I draw, and I need to have these things around
me. The paintings smell good. Photographs are documents of my
whole world. It’s almost like I’m obsessed with capturing these
things: sunsets, flowers, trees, chairs, cracks in the sidewalk,
but you can’t paint everything. So I do paintings of certain subjects
and that slows me down. That makes me see the world around me in
a much more organized way.
It is important for me to document and
save and preserve. I started doing it with pictures of my family. And
now I am so afraid that if I don’t document everything around me
that my vision will be lost and I want to pass that on."
And a
review from her 2006 show at Sherry Washington Gallery. Since
thedetroiter.com archives are currently out of commission, i dug up my
word doc from then. I think, as i wrote then, the word "celebratory"
fits her and her work so well. Best to all - Nick
Gilda Snowden @ Sherry Washington
Celebratory.
This
one word succinctly and accurately describes Gilda Snowden’s body of
work. In color, form, and movement, she captures the delight on her
canvas of being able to breathe, to love, to laugh, to know joy, to
know pain and sorrow – that is the celebration of what it is to be
human. By this nature, the paintings have an autobiographical quality,
in that they capture her expression, not in that they’re scenes from
her life, but that she captures that energy, that spirit that is her
person (or so we imagine as the viewer) through a variety of marks –
drips, splashes, cuts – applied purposefully yet almost chaotically.
The work immediately brings to mind a display of fireworks – explosions
of color on the night sky – and artistically speaking this references,
among other things, Whistler’s “The Falling Rocket.” (Which as it turns
out Snowden created work in response to some years back for the DIA’s
“Interventions” exhibition.) Fireworks have direction, form, yet their
explosive nature adds a fair amount of unpredictability to the mix.
Snowden
grounds the work with stand-ins (or rather sit-ins) for human figures
in the form of a chair. The chair is a uniquely human creation –
everything that stands must sit, but no others develop something
specifically to do so and have developed a whole way of life around
sitting. Rulers sit on thrones, we have “chairpersons”, and our
“favorite chair” seems to acquire an anthropomorphic personality. The
chair then is an extension of ourselves and we might imagine these
paintings then as emotional portraits of sorts.
From the initial
distance, the paintings are quite whole – lots of activity, yes, but
all the elements work together to maintain a cohesive structure.
Snowden works in multiple layers. It’s not clear at this distance, but
she makes great use of masking technique to create a strong dynamic
between the layers. At times she uses the unmasked areas both as marks
– an array of active, directional lines, and as unifying structure in
that, to take one example, a broad swath of color, concealed in the
outermost layers, is made visible and its more subtle presence holds
the painting tightly together. The masking along with the chairs and
other more straightforward geometric forms – circles, triangles, lines
– offer the work structure.
At middle distances, for the larger
works, some of this structure begins to break down. We’re close enough
now to see some of the details but still able take in the whole thing
all at once, and it’s just too much. If these are portraits, it has
become like seeing all the overlays of a medical diagram of a person at
the same time and trying to know who that person is. We need places to
take pause, before dancing off again. Even with the chairs firmly
established as the paintings’ focal point, at this distance, there
seems a need for greater rests.
The smaller works, no doubt in
part due to their scale, maintain this balance of activity and rest at
all distances. In the “red note” series, three small, square paintings,
Snowden has constructed strong linear movement, taking the viewer
upward, but always with the inclusion of something to draw the viewer’s
eye back in – her trademark chair, a parallelogram enclosing the space.
In a similarly sized chair triptych, Snowden offers her most spare
work, doing away with some of the intense all over activity and
allowing for solid areas of paint to stay at the surface. In one of the
strongest paintings, she’s cropped the chair close, so its form
stretches beyond the canvas, thus what remains really serves purely to
divide up the composition. In between the form of the chair, she layers
buttery creamy white paint, which in one place is slashed through but a
single time with a blood red arc. That stillness violated by such a
strong action works to great effect. This series seems like a promising
departure to offer Snowden great possibilities on future work.
Snowden’s
“See No Evil” series offer the same sort of directed focus – there’s an
“eye” at the center of each, defined simply, hardly more than a narrow
diamond form with circle inside, which makes the expressiveness not
about the recognizable form but about the energy of the painting. Of
which these have a great deal. That center is an almost literal eye of
the storm, as a calm space within a flurry of activity.
Moving
closer still, we start to see just all the complexity Snowden has
worked into her compositions. It’s a bit like being close enough to
someone to not just read that person’s iris as a particular color, but
as the mosaic of colors and very dimensional textures that they are.
There’s a delight in this discovery, this payoff. We’ve come from this
more external celebration inward to discover all that makes it tick.
For all the entanglement that makes reading the work at middle
distances more difficult, up close we see all the variety of marks and
diversity of Snowden’s techniques. A ring of a cup or a mug makes her
ubiquitous circles, but she employs it with great creativity as in one
example rolling this ring along the composition to make a stretched out
slinky silhouette, or a map of planetary precession, that is the wobble
of not quite circular orbits.
Repeated readings of the paintings
no doubt continue to bring new discoveries, and that returns us to the
idea of portraiture. The painting, like a person, offers something new
in each interaction, as greater depths are revealed to us. Snowden
offers a rich, joyful experience, and one to revisit as we look forward
to reconvening with our friends. – Nick Sousanis
Photo: Terribly
saddened to hear the news about Gilda Snowden today. My thoughts are
with her family and the Detroit arts community for such a tremendous
loss.Wanted to share two past things from my experience of Gilda -
first, her interview from the Why exhibition we put on at Work:Detroit:
http://whyproject.blogspot.com/2007/11/gilda-snowden.html And a review
from her 2006 show at Sherry Washington Gallery. Since thedetroiter.com
archives are currently out of commission, i dug up my word doc from
then. I think, as i wrote then, the word "celebratory" fits her and her
work so well. Best to all - Nick Gilda Snowden @ Sherry Washington
Celebratory. This one word succinctly and accurately describes Gilda
Snowden’s body of work. In color, form, and movement, she captures the
delight on her canvas of being able to breathe, to love, to laugh, to
know joy, to know pain and sorrow – that is the celebration of what it
is to be human. By this nature, the paintings have an autobiographical
quality, in that they capture her expression, not in that they’re
scenes from her life, but that she captures that energy, that spirit
that is her person (or so we imagine as the viewer) through a variety
of marks – drips, splashes, cuts – applied purposefully yet almost
chaotically. The work immediately brings to mind a display of fireworks
– explosions of color on the night sky – and artistically speaking this
references, among other things, Whistler’s “The Falling Rocket.” (Which
as it turns out Snowden created work in response to some years back for
the DIA’s “Interventions” exhibition.) Fireworks have direction, form,
yet their explosive nature adds a fair amount of unpredictability to
the mix. Snowden grounds the work with stand-ins (or rather sit-ins)
for human figures in the form of a chair. The chair is a uniquely human
creation – everything that stands must sit, but no others develop
something specifically to do so and have developed a whole way of life
around sitting. Rulers sit on thrones, we have “chairpersons”, and our
“favorite chair” seems to acquire an anthropomorphic personality. The
chair then is an extension of ourselves and we might imagine these
paintings then as emotional portraits of sorts. From the initial
distance, the paintings are quite whole – lots of activity, yes, but
all the elements work together to maintain a cohesive structure.
Snowden works in multiple layers. It’s not clear at this distance, but
she makes great use of masking technique to create a strong dynamic
between the layers. At times she uses the unmasked areas both as marks
– an array of active, directional lines, and as unifying structure in
that, to take one example, a broad swath of color, concealed in the
outermost layers, is made visible and its more subtle presence holds
the painting tightly together. The masking along with the chairs and
other more straightforward geometric forms – circles, triangles, lines
– offer the work structure. At middle distances, for the larger works,
some of this structure begins to break down. We’re close enough now to
see some of the details but still able take in the whole thing all at
once, and it’s just too much. If these are portraits, it has become
like seeing all the overlays of a medical diagram of a person at the
same time and trying to know who that person is. We need places to take
pause, before dancing off again. Even with the chairs firmly
established as the paintings’ focal point, at this distance, there
seems a need for greater rests. The smaller works, no doubt in part due
to their scale, maintain this balance of activity and rest at all
distances. In the “red note” series, three small, square paintings,
Snowden has constructed strong linear movement, taking the viewer
upward, but always with the inclusion of something to draw the viewer’s
eye back in – her trademark chair, a parallelogram enclosing the space.
In a similarly sized chair triptych, Snowden offers her most spare
work, doing away with some of the intense all over activity and
allowing for solid areas of paint to stay at the surface. In one of the
strongest paintings, she’s cropped the chair close, so its form
stretches beyond the canvas, thus what remains really serves purely to
divide up the composition. In between the form of the chair, she layers
buttery creamy white paint, which in one place is slashed through but a
single time with a blood red arc. That stillness violated by such a
strong action works to great effect. This series seems like a promising
departure to offer Snowden great possibilities on future work.
Snowden’s “See No Evil” series offer the same sort of directed focus –
there’s an “eye” at the center of each, defined simply, hardly more
than a narrow diamond form with circle inside, which makes the
expressiveness not about the recognizable form but about the energy of
the painting. Of which these have a great deal. That center is an
almost literal eye of the storm, as a calm space within a flurry of
activity. Moving closer still, we start to see just all the complexity
Snowden has worked into her compositions. It’s a bit like being close
enough to someone to not just read that person’s iris as a particular
color, but as the mosaic of colors and very dimensional textures that
they are. There’s a delight in this discovery, this payoff. We’ve come
from this more external celebration inward to discover all that makes
it tick. For all the entanglement that makes reading the work at middle
distances more difficult, up close we see all the variety of marks and
diversity of Snowden’s techniques. A ring of a cup or a mug makes her
ubiquitous circles, but she employs it with great creativity as in one
example rolling this ring along the composition to make a stretched out
slinky silhouette, or a map of planetary precession, that is the wobble
of not quite circular orbits. Repeated readings of the paintings no
doubt continue to bring new discoveries, and that returns us to the
idea of portraiture. The painting, like a person, offers something new
in each interaction, as greater depths are revealed to us. Snowden
offers a rich, joyful experience, and one to revisit as we look forward
to reconvening with our friends. – Nick Sousanis
