3.24.2009

joan snyder: narrative painting

Flowerfield/Tongue, 1999




In 1974, after working on her 'stroke' paintings – intense swaths of color painted over pencil-drawn grids – Joan Snyder began in earnest to make paintings which had what she referred to as a female sensibility. "In the early 1970s, women were forming groups and talking about things political and personal, and about our art," says Snyder. She says that these dialogues influenced the art world. "Women’s work helped to pump the blood back into what were dry, cold, and minimal years in the art world in the late 1960s."


Paint the House, 1970




Over the four decades of her prolific career, Snyder’s body of work has continually evolved in style and form. Beginning with the stroke paintings, Snyder's works have been essentially narratives of both personal and communal experiences. After abandoning formal grids as the basic structure of her paintings, Snyder’s work became more explicitly gestural and rooted in memory, while at the same time more complex materially.



Cloud Garden, 2003




The MacArthur Foundation profile of Joan Snyder declares that her paintings "mirror her personal experience, but, at the same time, the visual messages she provides through her images convey universal and readily understood emotions. Through a fiercely individual approach and persistent experimentation with technique and materials, Snyder has extended the expressive potential of abstract painting and inspired a generation of emerging artists."



Women Make Lists, 2001






:artnet; nielsen gallery

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

My god, these are wonderful. The last one grabs me especially.

Allison said...

I love your site so much! Thanks.

Anonymous said...

Though a picture is worth 1000 words, it can only tell us so much. Narrative even less. With that in mind here's your chance to spill the goods! You've been tagged in the 6 Random Things game. Sorry to be so meme spirited.

http://mocksure.blogspot.com/2009/03/target-mocksure.html

Daniel Peci said...

Great blog, very stylish and quality posts.

http://danielpeci.blogspot.com/

A Cuban In London said...

What I notice in female painters as opposed to male ones is that the former want to capture a piece of everyday, mundane life and highlight its beauty, whereas the latter are too focused on achieving the zeitgeist, the zenith, the classical the-world-as-one moment from which they can be looked up to whilst they sit on their pedestal. Well, that's my humble opinion. And I loved the images. Many thanks.

Greetings from London.

hmstrjam said...

i love joan snyder, also joan mitchell!

diana said...

thank you for posting joan snyder's work. i knew her name but not the work. when i woke up this morning, the first thing i wanted to see was your blog. thank you for sharing your sensibility this way.