On Wednesday, Sept. 24, artist and professor Stuart Snoddy held a talk in Peeler Auditorium to share his artwork and guide students through his process and evolution as an artist. He received his Bachelors in Fine Arts at the Herron School of Art and Design and his Masters in Fine Arts at Northern Illinois University. His artwork blends memories, nostalgia, experiences and fantasy to create art with tension. Snoddy explained how he has experimented with lines, the artist as subject, portraiture and disrupted nostalgia.
“It’s about revisiting something that may not be pleasant,” Snoddy said. “Present me will dissolve that fantasy of the past.”
Snoddy’s art journey truly began in high school. He began with cartoons and comic books until his teacher once handed him some paper and charcoal and told him simply, “Draw.” Since then, Snoddy has experimented with his own style.
The first book he bought with his own money was on John Sargent, the American painter and leading portraitist of his era. Sargant became one of Snoddy’s biggest influences and from whom he learned to oil paint. Snoddy was also inspired by Alphonse Mucha, a Czech painter known for his unique art style. Both influences still linger in his work today.
As an undergraduate, however, Snoddy said he was discouraged from admiring Sargent. He was told that painting was not what he was doing before. Social pressure pushed him to question what it meant to paint at all. He started by looking at a lot of Euan Uglow’s work, taking an interest in the use of hashmarks and measurements in the paintings and translating them into his own work.
During the process, Snoddy actually shifted away from painting. He worked with light installation structures, video, work in After Effects, animation, and cinemagraphs. “Art school had me bouncing around a lot and trying things out,” Snoddy said. “I was really interested in cinemagraphs. Painting has this infinite timeline, this infinite fraction that lasts forever. I want to know, can you do this with moving images?”
By the time Snoddy got to his graduate program, he was no longer feeling fulfilled. Because he was working with time arts then, he was not given a studio. “I had to fight to prove I deserved my own studio. During that time, I started doing paintings again and realized I loved it,” Snoddy said. In getting back into painting, Snoddy played with themes regarding form, tension and gestures but also the idea of concept versus observation. He also admires the technical aspects of painting more than the content itself. “There’s delight in making the visual effect of something.”
At one point, Snoddy experienced some pushback from his teachers regarding painting fantasy. He had to work through this tension between his feelings and the need to listen to his teachers. Even though he turned to contemporary artists and tried out other forms, Snoddy kept a sense of fantasy or an unsettling sense of nostalgia in his works. “There’s something interesting about the believability of something that doesn’t exist.”
Snoddy’s process is very automatic. He starts with scribbles and abstract markings, then extrapolates from there. He builds on things that stand out, then creates patterns until he finds his subject. He never looks at anything when he paints, either. It is just him, his markings and a lot of trial and error. When asked about a link between his various artworks, Snoddy said, “The commonality between my paintings is me. With any person’s painting, you’re the cohesive part of it.”
