04 September 2023 After seven decades devoted to Expressionist painting, octogenarian Sylvia Snowden could hardly be called a newcomer. But she is undoubtedly having a moment, with a solo exhibition in London finally marking long-overdue recognition in the UK. Why now exactly, asks Charlotte Jansen.
‘Discovered – that’s a bad word,’ Sylvia Snowden says emphatically, speaking from her home in Washington DC. When the word is flung around in the contemporary-art world, it usually refers to an artist who has been ignored, overlooked – someone the establishment slept on for decades. And it implies that it is only the establishment who can perform an act of discovery, as if an artist’s work only reveals itself once it hangs in the Western, white-dominated white cubes and museums for the audiences of such places. What does it mean to be ‘discovered’ – by and for whom? ‘I’m Black and I’m outside – and it doesn’t make me an insider because I have some paintings on someone’s wall. There are spaces, and then there are spaces.’
Snowden could be boxed in in this way: despite an extensive and international career, as an artist and educator, she is new to exhibiting in the UK. Attention has been steadily mounting here, following a first solo exhibition in 2022, a prize-winning appearance at Frieze Masters last year (resulting in an acquisition for the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge) and her inclusion in the Whitechapel Gallery’s reckoning with the history of Abstract Expressionism, Action, Gesture, Paint earlier this year – she flew in from Washington for the occasion. ‘It recognised all of us have been left out of everything – but we were there, we are here.’ This month, there is another opportunity to encounter Snowden, with the opening of a solo exhibition at Edel Assanti in London. On display will be a suite of eight very large paintings from her M Street series, named after the road in Washington’s Shaw neighbourhood where she’s lived since the 1970s. But all this, Snowden says in her characteristic, straightforward manner, ‘doesn’t change a thing’. Yet for audiences in London, a city whose contributions to Expressionism have been low-key, Snowden’s work may change a lot.
I’m beginning to understand where the incredible life force so palpable in Snowden’s paintings might come from. She describes herself as an Expressionist painter whose practice began when she was four; she’s now 81, and, while her style and technique may have changed, she remains true to that discipline. In the paintings selected for the M Street on White exhibition in London, her use of impasto is explosively expressive, Munch on fire. Snowden slathers her acrylic on so dense, she has to paint on the floor and the works begin to resemble bas-reliefs. You can feel the physical effort in their surfaces, a conversation with, or against, the cold flatness of the masonite.
The M Street paintings shown in London were all, with the exception of one, made in 1978, and feature figures splayed against white backgrounds. Their titles refer to real people who lived in Shaw at the time – Julia Shepherd (1980) is named after a neighbour who still lives there, and moved in around the same time as Snowden – but they are not portraits or social commentary on the community in any sense. ‘I did not socialise with anyone on the block,’ she tells me pointedly. I ask Snowden if she remembers what she felt painting them at the time. ‘Goodness gracious no! Heavens no!’ she cries. ‘When I’ve made a statement through painting then that’s the end of it – I have to save my thoughts and feelings for the next work. I don’t go back – that takes up too much energy. I look forward.’
Sylvia Snowden, Pauline Johnson, 1978, Acrylic and oil pastel on Masonite, 121.9 x 243.8 cm, 48 x 96 in. Copyright the artist. Courtesy Edel Assanti and Franklin Parrasch Gallery, New York. Photo: Adam Reich.
Snowden is currently working on abstract paintings – she has moved back and forth between figuration and abstraction, but her subject matter has always remained the same: ‘the condition of man’. The M Street paintings subsume the viewer with feelings. Her mawkish figures, reminiscent of Schiele but supersize, are weighed down by heavy feet, rooting their body down to the ground; while the hands gesture to the inner world, the soul – Snowden has an enduring interest in the expressive power of hands, which she says communicate more than words. Colour deals blows to the stomach, shifting from blazing palettes to earthy hues. In thick whorls of acrylic, they create an emotive cacophony of grief, pain, anger, elation, abjection, power, beauty – these are portraits of the unquantifiable fervour of human emotion. The figures try to move, pushing against their edges as far as they are permitted, finding and filling and expanding into every space. Yet against their blank, white backgrounds they float, underlining a final, eternal condition of solitude and emptiness. ‘We are going to return to a different form than what we know – we know this, but we have a desire to escape it,’ Snowden says.
Most of the London works are of women. Snowden has frequently depicted women, and the violence in women – she has painted them as rapists, aggressors, protectors, enemies and sisters. ‘Perhaps I paint women because I am a woman,’ she says wryly. ‘But a woman has two breasts and a man has one penis; it occupies a different amount of space. I wanted to make a statement about men and women, no matter what cultural background they’re from. As human beings, we face certain realities – that’s what those paintings are about.’
Over the years, exhibitions, accolades and awards have come and gone. But the most important place to Snowden is her studio at home in Shaw. When she bought it she had recently returned from a year in Australia at the University of Sydney, and had been through a divorce. She was looking for a home big enough for her to live with her two children and to paint. Shaw – then an impoverished neighbourhood – was affordable, with its very large, elegant Victorian row houses. Houses in the area now worth on average more than $800,000 and it is one of the city’s most fashionable districts.
Snowden’s studio, however, remains a closed and intensely private place. Almost no-one has been permitted to enter in the 40 years she has worked there. ‘It’s a workplace, it’s not a place I entertain. I do not have company enter my studio. It’s personal – you wouldn’t want someone sitting on your bed.’ There is only space for Snowden to work on one painting a time – she has to wait for each work to dry, a process that demands time. But having a studio at home allowed her to continue to make work prolifically while raising her children; now that she’s an octogenarian it offers convenience. She is in the studio every day. Her determination to preserve the privacy of this space, I feel, has also given Snowden the possibility to be true to herself, without deference to the outside – and certainly not to conventions of the art world. ‘Most of my time has been spent making the work. I wanted to do two things in life: have children and paint. I don’t go around saying, “Look at my paintings,” or trying to understand my role, or understand the process I use. It’s not necessary for me – why I’m doing it doesn’t make any difference.’
After more than seven decades painting, Snowden’s devotion to expressing the profoundly personal as universal and familiar has been unwavering. Her paintings are inconclusive and uncertain, allowing slippage in meaning and space to breathe into. This can be overwhelming to behold and experience; a reminder that a work of art does not exist to be discovered, but to awaken a discovery in you.
