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| Are Mine, 2010 Oil, acrylic, glitter, rosebuds, burlap on panel 30 x 30 inches |
Joan Snyder paints us an interior landscape, an inside garden, if you will. It is a mythical place, a profound place, scratched out of the earth inside her.
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| Joan Snyder, Magic Meadow, 2007 |
There are deeply rooted plants, beds, rows, flowers, fields. Everything grows there. Memories, dreams, ideas, revelations. Disappointments, joys, sorrows, and hopes. She loads them up like Viking Funeral ships and floats them out to sea.
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| 1970 oil, acrylic, and spray enamel on canvas, 72" x 96 |
We get to witness them float by one by one, like the Macy's Day Parade. Her beds of roses. Her Rose Bowl Parade.
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| Nights of Summer 2010 Oil, acrylic, paper mache on linen 30 x 64 inches |
As we watch them go by we admire them. We admire them like a garden. We notice there is more. Messages scrawled in the dirt. They sing to us. Strange and mysterious songs of all manner of experience.
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| Joan Snyder; Yellow Was Blue (2013); 48" x 48" |
They circle around and spiral down inside us. Like sirens they pull us onto their rocks. We drown in their paint and colors and song. We turn in the eddies of paint and flotsam and jetsam in her paintings and they in turn drill eddies of the like inside of us.
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| "New Moonfield", 2008 Acrylic, burlap, silk, cheesecloth, wooden beads, paper mache on linen, 54"×78" |
Joan Snyder has always been a poet painter. She has always plumbed the depths beneath the painted surface. It has been ideal for her. A place to have it all. The poem and the garden, in paint. A place to put it all, tend it all, realize it all, act it all out.
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| 1970 oil, acrylic, and spray enamel on canvas, 72" x 96 |
Yes, there is theater here. Drama here. A stage. Joan Snyder gets to set the stage in her paintings and the actors play their parts, engage each other in action, stand up for what's right, and tell their stories. Passionately. Fiercely. Social justice, political protest, world events, tragedy, history, comedy, romance. Love and death. Hope and glory. Birth, rebirth, transformation, redemption, celebration. It is all there.
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| WOL, 2010 (standing for "Women of Liberia") oil, acrylic, paper mache, mud, cloth, seeds and glass beads on linen |
Joan Snyder's paintings have always been wise down to their roots. The wisdom of the ages. Very serious stuff. And well they should be? They have truths to tell, fields to plant. There is no time to lose.
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ALIZARIN AND ICE, 2006
Oil, acrylic, twigs, seeds, fabric, paper,
glitter on linen
42 x 62 inches
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Addison Parks
Artdeal Magazine
Spring Hill, November 2016
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| Joan Snyder 2012 |
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| Joan Snyder with Proserpina in progress, 2012 |
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