Few techniques are as fundamental to the history of painting as impasto, which refers to the texture of thickly applied paint on the surface of a work. Over the course of six decades, Sylvia Snowden’s (born 1942) paintings have explored the possibilities and limits of impasto as a vehicle for communicating emotion and experience. Born in Washington D.C. to two educators, Snowden studied art at Howard University in the 1960s under artists Lois Mailou Jones, David Driskell, James A. Porter, and James Lesesne Wells. “Those people knew their craft, they understood their craft,” the artist stated in a recent interview, though she also noted that her professors’ pedagogical approach pushed students to develop their own style and direction.1 For Snowden, that encouragement toward individuality and self-assertion resulted in an oeuvre of expressionist paintings that drip, dangle, and drag across the canvas, their surfaces as agitated as the figures they often depict. Emphasis on painterly proficiency and fluency in fundamental artistic techniques—including color theory and anatomy—are key to Snowden’s work. When asked whether her use of color is intuitive, for instance, the artist retorted, “it’s learned,” stressing that her choices are deliberate, calculated, and acquired through a lifetime of study.2 Likewise, her capacity for spontaneously composing her figures on the canvas without the use of sketches speaks to her years of life drawing and studying anatomy.

Snowden’s decision to work with acrylic paint was originally a product of circumstance. Her children’s aversion to the noxious smell of turpentine and the challenges of transporting slow-drying oil paintings from Australia, where she was living, to the United States drove Snowden to shift mediums.3 In interviews, Snowden, who still refers to herself as an oil painter, openly references her distain for the acrylic, noting that the paint, which is plastic, “dies” once it has dried, becoming impossible to alter. The artist contrasts these properties with the natural qualities of oil paint.4 To compensate for the medium’s shortcomings, she uses oil pastel to modify the surfaces of her work once the acrylic is dry. Notably, the peculiarities of surface in the artist’s work—the undulating, almost wave-like texture in her M-Street portraits and the sweeping pools of color in works such as June 12—would not be possible were it not for Snowden’s deft engagement with acrylic paint. The paint in her works appears as if frozen thanks to its ability to dry exponentially faster than oil paint, which would form a skin and sag when applied in extremely thick layers.

The emphasis on technique in Snowden’s work is undergirded by the artist’s lifelong dedication to humanistic investigation of experience and emotion, of which Darleen Shannon and June 12 are two divergent examples. Profoundly drawn to the history of Western art (indeed, Snowden strongly considered pursuing a doctorate in art history), the artist’s awareness of and interest in the work of expressionists Chaim Soutine and Oscar Kokoschka are immediately evident in her early figurative work. Building on the language of these artistic influences, Snowden painted Darlene Shannon when she was living in the M-Street neighborhood of Washington D.C. in the late 1970s and 1980s, when it was an impoverished Black community. Snowden settled in the area because it offered her an opportunity to purchase a home with enough room for studio space. A daughter of upper class, highly educated parents, the artist found little common ground with the other residents and maintained distant, if friendly, relations with the men and women in her new surroundings. And, though her tortured M- Street portraits bear the names of the people she lived near and saw each day, Snowden has repeatedly emphasized that the works are not portraits, but rather that the titles commemorate and index the people she once knew.5 Their titles aside, the artist has stated that the works themselves have “nothing to do with them as people.”6 Snowden notes that the horror, struggle, and despair that her M-Street portraits capture are as applicable to rich white women as they are to the struggling men and women she saw outside her home each day. In Darleen Shannon and other works from this series, Snowden positions pain as a universal human experience that cuts across race and class.

Snowden shifted toward non-objective work in the early 1990s, and her output from this period included a series of paintings that celebrated and commemorated her parents, George and Jessie Snowden, both of whom were unequivocally supportive of their daughter’s artistic pursuits.7 The paintings were exhibited at the National Museum of Women in the Arts shortly after they were painted, and Snowden titled each work after significant dates, places, and names to her parent’s lives. June 12, which refers to the night of her parent’s anniversary, captures the buzz and giddy energy of a wedding night while simultaneously conveying the importance and power of the event through the size of the canvas, which is nine feet tall. Here, as in her M-Street pieces, Snowden’s mastery of impasto and color drives the emotional narrative of the work. The heavy, poured application of the top layers of orange and yellow paint, almost a quarter-inch thick in some areas, contrasts with the cool grey washes underneath, lending the piece a sense of atmospheric depth while conveying the joyousness of the occasion. Entirely non-objective, June 12 nevertheless recalls the sublime experience of a memorable celebration. Whether working in a non-objective or figurative style, Snowden’s works function as ruminations on the human condition—its bottomless capacity for misery and despair, as well as the moments of elation and joy that make perseverance possible.

Anastasia Kinigopoulo