ABOUT THE ARTIST
Snoddy always starts by picking up on elements from a previous painting. Then he constructs a multi lined grid, and the interjection of these lines helps him to arrive at a new work. While this sounds methodical, intuition plays its part and is revealed in the pentimenti inherent in the act of painting. He often regards it as a cousin of the earlier painting – related, yet not too closely. Snoddy likens the whole activity of making art to building a family. But he is even more convinced that structure is the absolute key to a fully considered and contemplative painting. He invites us to think about process, and work out for ourselves how the images have been arrived at. He says, ‘I would hope that the paintings reward looking at to induce a slow, inexorable awareness of intricate relationships’ and ‘through the reworking of the paintings glimpses of the decision making reveal themselves.’
Perpetually looking at work by other artists, Snoddy now finds stimulus in painters as diverse as Mark Rothko, Vanessa Bell, Richard Diebenkorn, Hans Hofmann, Callum Innes, Piet Mondrian, Robert Motherwell, Blinky Palermo, Gerhard Richter, William Scott and Sean Scully. In very different ways they are, like him, fascinated by the manifold possibilities inherent in abstraction. It is easy, for example, to imagine how these artists affect him; Rothko’s arresting bands of colour could have strengthened Snoddy’s resolve to investigate an equally mysterious region of his own; the small but startling Abstract Painting by Vanessa Bell of 1914 in the Tate collection provides a clear bold structure; Diebenkorn’s Ocean Park series harnessed his determination in pursuit of an internal struggle for ‘rightness’; the ‘push pull’ of Hofmann; the formal beauty of Innes; the measure of Mondrian; Motherwell’s elegiac Spanish series; Palermo’s constructivist purity and order; Richter’s sheer elan; Scott’s balance and poise and Scully’s building blocks of colour.’ (Richard Cork).