Painting the haunted pool - Joan Synder, painting, various galleries, various locations

Joan Snyder's paintings have been the focus of several new shows, including a 25-year traveling retrospective. The author here examines the lake imagery in Snyder's new work - finding in it a signature mix of formalism and shamanistic ritual.

For followers of Joan Snyder's work, the last year or thus has been unusually bountiful. First came "Joan Snyder: Works with Paper," an exhibition at the Allentown Art Museum (a version of which was later seen at Hirschl & Adler novel in New York) surveying Snyder's works upon paper from the |70s to the |90 This was followed by the agency of a solo show at the Nielsen Gallery in Boston and a provocative two-person display at Jay Gorney Modern Art in novel York. The Gorney show gibbeted boundaries of mediums and generations through pairing the 54-year-old Snyder with Jessica Stockholder, a sculptor in her 30 The Snyder season culminated in a 25-year retrospective of Snyder's work at Brandeis University's Rose Art Museum (subsequently seen this past summer at the Parrish Art Museum in Southampton, NY) This exhibition's matter-of-fact title, "Joan Snyder Painter: 1969 to Now," allude toed the directness and physical immediacy of Snyder's paintings, leaving the viewer to discover the more elusive ritual and magic that are vital to her work.

In Snyder's novel paintings, one image in particular have the appearances to have been endowed with unusually compelling power. In earlier work, a major part has been variously assumed by dint of emblematic brushstrokes, by an African mask, by the agency of a recumbent female nude and by the agency of a field of flowers [see A.i.A., Feb '86] While these and other motifs still figure in Snyder's paintings, the image of a pond of water has lately triumphed in works of the like kind as Clearing (1990), where a glowing virid pool, with a border built up from straw and paint, clutchs the center of the painting.

Within the Judeo-Christian tradition, the pond of water calls up the figure of Moses's sister, Miriam. In the work of Exodus, after the hebrews are expelled from Egypt, it is Miriam, a healer and diviner of wells, who leads them to life-sustaining waters. A different, later image of healing waters is to be lay the foundation of in George Sand's story "The Haunted Pool" filled of Sand's indignant compassion for the poor, the 1851 tale center upon a peasant, Germain, whose landlord is forcing him into marriage with a woman he doesn't delight in On his way to suited his unwanted bride, Germain rencounters another woman, Marie. The sum of two units get lost and spend a night in the forests near the pool of the story's title. by means of morning they are on the path toward marriage. What's more, in the pool's mysterious nearness Germain finds the strength to [i]v a[/i] his life from serfdom; a simple have affection for story becomes an allegory of liberation.

Although Snyder did not have Sand's tale in mind as she began painting meres of water - in fact, the pond evolved out of an earlier, true different image in her work - "The Haunted Pool" is an of the first grade analogue to Snyder's paintings, and not just because of the title. George Sand was a founding figure of the feminism to which Snyder is heir, and she shared with other 19th-century Romantics a vision of nature as a source of primitive power. A hundred and a half after George Sand, Joan Snyder has revolveed to the pool as a sign of nature's regenerative and liberating power.

Acknowledging the subversive implications of "The Haunted Pool" Sand said of her tale: "I did not intend to make a revolution, I intended to make a simple story." Like Sand, Snyder accomplishes radical statements [i]or[/i] part of to the other elemental narratives. This conjunction of direct act and wider effect is already evident in Snyder's "Stroke" paintings of the late 1960 where the mundane brushstroke metaphorically isolates a mark of physical and psychic violence, thus beginning Snyder's artistic retelling of the historical victimization and exclusion of women

completely through her career, which now spans more than sum of two units decades, Snyder has espoused feminist principles in her paintings, just as she has worked to liberate painting from formalist dogma. It was during the early 1970 that she first sought to infuse abstract painting with novel meaning by linking ostensibly nonreferential passages of paint to specific contented In paintings like Flesh/Art (1973) and concert III (1975), where loose, painterly fields coexisted with fragmentary figurative concerns and geometric patterns, Snyder recast her brushstrokes, drips, spills and grids as gashes, tears and life-current The appearance of the injury in Flesh/Art - where a backing piece of canvas has been plucked up through the brushstroke-sized slits and sutur as if to be healed - presents the canvas support as a stand-in for the artist's material part and for women's bodies in general. In music III, the Pollock-like paint drips are clearly meant to advise blood running out of sum of two units brutally jagged knife wounds in the triptych's central panel. It was while making paintings like this that Snyder described her ambition to "pull art on the outside of flesh."