Over the past six decades, American artist Sylvia Snowden has dedicated her expressionist practice to the complexity of the human condition. Her refined painterly technique, which involves the building up of thick layers of acrylic paint and oil pastel on Masonite (in the early years) and canvas, morphs and distorts her subject, so that their figurative forms are pushed to the precipice of recognisability, venturing, even, into the realm of abstraction.
Paula Black was presented in Paris as part of Snowden’s ‘M Street’ series, titled after a street in Washington, DC’s Shaw – a neighbourhood known for its African American history – where the artist has lived and worked since the late 1970s. Created between 1978 and 1997, each painting in ‘M Street’ captures a different person in the community, whether neighbours, friends or strangers, many of whom were unemployed or unhoused.
Snowden understands her own work as a ‘structural’ species of abstract expressionism: ‘it’s based on the structure of a human, but the figure isn’t necessarily the subject matter. The figures become paint.’
As Snowden herself has remarked, ‘my figures do extend themselves to the perimeters of the canvas or paper – they’re coming out to meet you, to greet you. The point is, they’re pushing out of those parameters. But they’re not tortured [...] I’m trying to get into the whole guts of a person; I paint the person without the packaging.
