Sept. 2012
Joan Snyder is at work in her Woodstock studio, dabbing papier mache onto a large canvas. In the large white room, which is illuminated by skylights and adjoins the house she shares with her partner, Margaret Cammer, the painting sings, its vivid, white rosettes like soprano notes emerging from a basso continuum of sweet, dripping purple soaked into the canvas, with a scrawl of red providing a screeching counterpoint. Snyder, in a loose sleeveless gray T-shirt, stands, looks, and applies the material a few times before graciously taking a break to speak to her afternoon visitor.
Born in 1940 in Highland Park, NJ, to working-class parents—her father was a toy salesman–Snyder became famous in the early 1970s for her stroke paintings. The strokes, applied to the canvas in vibrant, often dripping colors, sometimes stacked, like notes on a scale, are completely abstract, but plaintive with emotion. Tension arises from the pull between opposites: passion and spontaneity versus the spare and deliberate; lyricism versus dissonance; intimacy versus the universal and totemic; order versus rumination and chance occurrence. She moved on to grids and triptychs, whose cool classicism was juxtaposed with raw, painterly welts and slits, built up with thick paint encrusted with paper, fabric, cheesecloth, papier mache, mattress batting, and other common materials. These works referenced the female body, not as dispassionate object, but as inhabited being. In the 1980s, Snyder made dark, moody landscapes and thickly textured field paintings; a single empty rectangle floats in some of the works, which the artist likened to an altar, both a metaphor for her art and literal magnetic meditative force.
Some of the works of the late 1980s are overtly political, containing collaged photo images of starving children or incarcerated women. Beginning in the 1990s, her palette lightened and floral- and fruit-inspired gestural forms covered the canvas. A common motif was a singular circular form, alluding to ponds, flowers, breasts, openings, and fruit. Snyder also made narrative paintings whose story unfolds across a scroll-like expanse, scrawled with words and often incorporating figures and other imagery as well as found objects, such as herbs, straw, velvet, and even plastic grapes—a recurrent motif symbolizing a tumescent female eroticism. The narratives are always secondary to Snyder’s language of paint, whose earthy substance and calibrated balance of forms, colors, and textures reinforce the integrity of the object, a quality reminiscent of Klee.
Snyder belonged to the nation’s first wave of feminist artists and was active in feminist issues. But her painting defied facile pigeonholing as she forged her own path, exploring universal themes, such as love, death, sex, and motherhood, in response to her personal experiences and impulses. Despite the risks this entailed, her career never stalled. She was a recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in 1974, a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1983, and a MacArthur Fellowship in 2007. She is the subject of several books, including a handsome monogram published by Abrams. Currently “Dancing With the Dark: Joan Snyder Prints 1963-2010,’’ a survey organized by the Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University, is on tour and will open in New Mexico in September. In October, a show of her paper pulp paintings will open at the Cristin Tierney Gallery, in New York’s Chelsea. [Joan: you mentioned a group show, with Chris Burden, Dennis Openheimer and other artists…is this the Tierney show or something else? Please clarify. Thanks.]
Snyder divides her time between Woodstock and Brooklyn. Family has lately been a cause for celebration: she and Cammer, a retired acting State Supreme Court justice in Brooklyn, were married in June, and in July Snyder’s daughter gave birth to her first grandchild. Life has been good, though not always easy.
What’s the secret of your ability to be endlessly inventive and inspired?
I don’t have a clue. Every once in a while I say this is it, I’ve done enough. But then I get into the studio and I’m so happy. It’s all still coming.
After attending Douglass College, you earned an MFA at Rutgers University in 1966 and shortly after moved to New York. What got you interested in art?
I took an introductory painting course at Douglass. When I started painting it was like speaking for the first time, because I really felt, even as a young and not very accomplished painter, I could communicate feelings and ideas I couldn’t do otherwise. Something inside of me fortunately came out. It was always there in one or another different ways.
What is was like being a woman artist in the late 1960s?
[Feminism] was not something anybody was talking about in 1963 when I started. When I went to graduate school, I suddenly realized there were no women teaching in the art department, even though it was a women’s school. We had no role models. And they weren’t going to give me space in their small gallery in the graduate school, that was not for women artists’ shows. After I got out I started a series of women’s shows at the Douglass College Library [at Rutgers] called the Mary H. Dana Women’s Artists Series. It’s still going on today. I brought in women artists from New York City. People like Louise Bourgeois…the list is long. I was curator for about two years. They built a little museum for those shows. This was a very ground-breaking thing. It was the first place where women were showing their work anywhere.
How did the feminist movement affect your career?
My own career, which started about 1970, had nothing to do with feminism. After eight years of painting, you develop a language, which in my case was the stroke paintings. I was a very good painter but I was also very lucky. I made it young as a woman and it had nothing to do with the women’s movement at the time. Two years later, I became involved with the women’s movement. I moved to a farm in Pennsylvania with my husband, [photographer Larry Flint]. The recognition was starting to become very difficult for me. I had lots of new people in my life, and I didn’t know who was a friend and who was not. When I moved to the farm I I stopped doing the stroke paintings, though there was a long list of collectors wanting them, and started doing what at the time were outrageous feminist paintings. They included Vanishing Theater and Heart On.
It must have taken courage to change your style after you had developed a following.
I couldn’t do these stroke paintings anymore because they got kind of easy. I always did okay. I’ve always gone my own way. I’ve gotten criticized for all kinds of stuff—that I wear my heart on my sleeve, that I write on my paintings and therefore I’m a feminist, which is a dirty word. If Cy Twombly or Julian Schnabel write on theirs, they’re considered very poetic and sensitive. It’s belittling. But what are you going to do?
Art’s become such a commodity. Does the market present new challenges now?
For me it’s always been sort of slow and steady. I’m not involved with what lots of other people do and what collectors are doing. I see friends’ shows. I’m involved in a younger generation who haven’t shown yet. One is my assistant, who is my daughter’s age. I’ll look at her work and suddenly see things. She’s a figurative painter, but very modern.
My work can be very political, it can be narrative, it can be feminist, it can be all kinds of things. It makes it more difficult not having a brand. Your life always informs your art. But the work also has a trajectory of its own. There’s always formal aspects and not-so-formal aspects that I pay attention to all the time. Maybe it’s over for painting like this, but when I come into the studio this is what I do best and what I love.
How does a painting start?
I usually start with lots of little drawings. Or I’m sitting at a concert and get a painting idea. This painting [pointing to the painting on the wall] happened to start in the dentist’s chair. When I have serious dental stuff going on, I start painting in my head. I can’t do anything else except think about my work in a meditative way. It started out with a moon field idea, but I didn’t want to do a moon field. It will be full of different kinds of totems and cloth, it will go beyond a field of moons.
I have piles and piles of notebooks with little sketches and words and colors. I really edit myself carefully before I make a painting. I probably turn down ten ideas before I go with one. I date a sketch, and once I’ve gone back four, five times I know that I want to use it.
Many of your paintings have “symphony” in the title. Is music a big influence?
Music is a huge inspiration. I probably learn more from listening to music than from looking at other art. I listen to music the whole time I’m working. For the last few days it’s been Bach and Martha Wainwright. Just the way the painting builds, the sound, the texture, the tone, it’s got everything, the minor and major keys. I pretty much can hear the painting. That’s how I work, listening to the painting.
What art style influenced you the most?
My first connection with art was German Expressionism. I went nuts, it totally spoke to me. It’s in my background, which is German Russian.
You’ve put a lot of materials and found objects in your paintings, including children’s paintings.
That’s from when I taught art in Bedford Stuyvesant in a special program. I collected lots of paintings the kids did and put them in a few of the paintings. One is owned by the Museum of Modern Art. It’s called Sweet Cathy’s Song.
I do take from everything and everywhere. A friend bought the plastic grapes at a yard sale and gave them to me. I started putting them in paintings because they were serious and funny at the same time. Blood and humor…cause they’re plastic grapes.
Your art is about beauty, but it’s also about psychic pain. Could you comment about this?
Everything my mother did I did exactly the opposite with my own daughter. My mother was very negative. She had her reasons, but I never got any support. I have surmounted it, though it’s not like you don’t take all that with you, you’re imprinted with that early on. My art is very expressionistic. Part of the imagery comes from horrible pain, the pain I experienced in childhood. It comes out in the paintings.
What was the most challenging time of your life?
I left [my husband] Larry when Molly was six months old and then I was alone for eight years. It wasn’t easy, raising a kid on my own. Then I met Maggie and we’ve been together every since.
It was natural [falling in love with her. Being with women] was something I was always a little interested in. But I was also madly in love with my husband. I left not because I was gay, things just weren’t working. I’ve been with Maggie 25 years. There’s high and lows and everything in between, but mostly it’s really great. She’s a great partner. She’s an art lover. She goes to the theater all the time, loves movies, she sees more museum shows than I do.
What’s your biggest challenge now?
I suffer from a lot of anxiety. I deal with it every day. I’ve had it since I was a kid. It’s why I keep my life simple. If I have an empty calendar it makes me the happiest. If Maggie’s is full she’s happiest. She drags me out. Otherwise, I’d be a complete hermit. Art is a total refuge.
What brought you to Woodstock?
Maggie had a cabin in Willow when she and I got together in 1987. I had a house in Eastport, Long Island, but after meeting her I started coming up here more.
We were living in the woods with no heat and lots of mice, but I loved it, no one bothered me. However, I had to schlep water to the studio, and one day I said to Maggie, ‘we’ve got to find a new house.’ We were looking for three years, but everything with a studio was always a little out of our price range. Then I got the MacArthur fellowship, and the next day this house went on the market. It had a huge garage, which I built out 14 feet for my studio. It is my dream studio. It changed my life.
Do you ever take a break from painting?
I might go a month or two without painting, but when I’m painting I do it all the time. I work on a painting constantly until it’s done.
What do you do when you’re not painting?
I’m in a book club, which is great. We’re reading the classics, books you’d never read on your own, like Swann’s Way. Right now we’re reading Daniel Deronda. I also have a huge garden and am writing a play. It’s about power. It has two stories: Sabrina [last name] was a patient of Jung’s. When the two were very young, they had an affair. She became very influential herself but never got the recognition. The second story is more contemporary. It’s about a psychiatrist and her patient who have an affair. I have been working on it for seven years. I figure I have one play in me.
Any other special activities you and Maggie share?
We’ve gone to a lot of yoga workshops. Now we’re both doing Pilates. We have a great teacher and do it two times a week, often together.
We do a bit of traveling, though when we make a plan we tend to cancel. We have fantasies of traveling the world. We’re going to Italy in the fall.
Is life much different now than when you were younger?
The big issue for me is my knees. I got replacements in 2008 and 2009. Before that I was in pain for quite a few years. I think painters get bad knees because you’re on your feet all day.
The thing that’s made me feel most excited these days and a little bit old is I just became a grandmother. Three weeks ago my daughter had a son. He’s really cute and we’re madly in love with him. It’s exciting.
Do you still enjoy the city?
I don’t love the city anymore. It’s just too much for me. It’s nice where we live. It’s a little like Fire Island: there’s a big koi pond in the back yard and the carriage house is my studio. If it wasn’t that good, I wouldn’t want to be there, although Maggie loves it. More and more I’m going to be staying here. I love it–not just the environment and nature but also the wonderful community of friends.
Life sounds good.
I’m really grateful for our lives. We’re very lucky. The thing you hope for as you get older is that you stay healthy, that’s the big fear. It starts to happen, where people get different illnesses.
What’s that painting you’re looking at on your laptop?
It’s a new painting based on a song written by Martha Wainwright. She plans to use it for the cover of her new CD. She’s coming to my studio in Brooklyn tomorrow to look at it.