Intimate Painting

Arryn Snowball Auntie’s hands, 2021

tempera on linen, 190 x 190 cm

When the clouds are patterned silver, sometimes we call it a Mackerel sky, as it is often better fishing on an overcast dawn. But when I brought this painting home, my partner said it reminded her of the hands of her great aunt, with whom she was very close. Can we stretch meaning to allow this painting to combine both atmospheres? When the dawn is held in the cup of the waves, however briefly, the translucent pink glows as gentle as Auntie’s hands.

For the last few years, I’ve painted in response to a body of poems by Nathan Shepherdson. Nathan wrote the seventy-seven Slack Water poems in 2017, using Grant’s Guide to Fishes as material and ground. Grant’s epic Guide has over eight hundred pages, each page about a different fish. The title of each poem is a page number of this Guide, and each poem is made from words found in the text on that fish (…) The poems are powerful, abstract, visceral, and the ocean swells within them. Working from the Slack Water poems gave me a different access to the Pacific than what a more literal approach might have done. I sunk into them. Shepherdson’s poetic images tangled with my memories of fishing on the coast as a kid, of time spent out on the reef, on beaches, headlands, tidal flats, at mouth of estuaries.

I think of these paintings as traps for light and colour, as nets of rhythm and movement, as vessels to hold the poet’s metaphors and the meanings that might be found in them. I imagine these paintings as atmospheres at different times of day, as fragments of sky and horizon. I imagine reflections from above and below the water (…) I pretend these windows are also mirrors that reflect the ocean within. This process has been my fishing while here in Berlin, my contact with the Pacific coast, with home.

‘I put my trust in process and follow where it leads. Process is at the heart of abstract painting. It is where the work springs from and where I return. It is my discipline, my practice. I’m interested in what painting is. What is specific to the medium I’m into the basics: line, colour, shape, and how they interact, how they create depth and rhythm, how they collect other things, such as meaning, feeling, human vulnerability’. — (Art Guide Interview, 2020) 

Arryn Snowball, born 1977 in Sydney is an Australian artist who has been living and working in Berlin for the last seven years. He has participated in the broader arts community through collaborative projects, lecturing, forums, critical writing, workshops, and artist run initiatives.

Snowball has a Doctorate of Visual Arts from the Griffith University, Brisbane where he taught painting from 2005-2012. He recently had solo exhibitions in Brisbane, Canberra and Melbourne. Snowball’s work is held in the collections of the National Gallery of Australia and Artbank. Over the last seventeen years his work has been shown in twentynine solo exhibitions and numerous group shows in galleries, museums and institutes in Australia, Japan and Europe.

www.arrynsnowball.com