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].”
There is one thing for which Snyder will readily leave her ivory tower: live music. She’s been a fan of Philip Glass’s forever. (“He was our plumber in the ’70s,” she deadpans, recalling the scantily equipped Mulberry Street loft she shared with her ex, the late photographer Larry Fink. “[Philip] was working with his family’s business while he was making Einstein on the Beach.”) She spent the year of 1992 listeningto Mozart’s Great Mass while grieving her mother. And she makes regular pilgrimages to Woodstock’s Maverick Concert Hall for classical performances. It’s there, in “our Tanglewood,” that many of Snyder’s paintings begin. “Listening to live music inspires me more than going to a museum,” she says.
Every Joan Snyder work is a palimpsest of sorts. At concerts, sketchbook in hand, the artist translates what she hears onto the page. The painter then returns to her concert sketches intermittently, annotating them with a new idea or motif each time. It can take years for one to make its way into a painting, and the finished product is rarely a mirror of the initial gesture.
Snyder primes and stains her canvases before pasting a farrago of other materials: Paper towels, bits of fabric, twigs, dried flowers, and papier-mâché can all form the base for the alternatingly abstract and figurative shapes that populate her paintings. To this density, swaths of high-octane hues are added (she sees colors like notes of music). Often, words follow—a reflection of her stream of thoughts as she paints. When I point to one work, on which the letters “OMG” are scribbled, and ask where they came from, she says, “I just thought, Oh my god, because it was kind of a crazy painting.”
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?"
