November Issue 1999
Current In Still Water Celebrates 20 Years Of Sneddon Exhibitions at Craven Allen Gallery, Durham, NC
Sue Sneddon is always
working on a painting, even when she's not applying paint to canvas.
That's part of the meaning behind the title piece in her latest
show, Current in Still Water, on view at Craven Allen Gallery
in Durham, NC, from Nov. 7 through Jan. 8, 2000.
Sneddon explains, "These are images that have run through me when I'm driving. walking, dreaming. I even have one painting that took me nine years. It took the current running in my head that long before I knew how to accomplish the image I wanted."
The show's title piece depicts a scene in Washington State's San Juan Islands, where Sneddon witnessed a small current running through otherwise motionless water. Each part of the water -- moving and still -- reflected different aspects of the surrounding landscape. More generally, the subject matter in this exhibition was inspired by Sneddon's travels from Puget Sound in the west to Bogue Sound in NC, where the artist spends at least a month every autumn.
Sneddon's pilgrimages to the ocean are always a time of reflection -- literally and figuratively. "I row my rubber boat out at sunset each night into Bogue Sound," she says. "The only sound is my oars in the water. When I get out beyond the piers, I just drift in the mirror of the water. It is a feeling of floating in between worlds. Am I in the sky or the water?"
Says one collector, "Sue Sneddon's work has changed the way I look at the world every day. I used to go to the beach. Now I see it." Others have compared the impact of her paintings to Georgia O'Keeffe's. Like O'Keeffe, Sneddon often renders the small very large, allowing a seashell fragment to fill an expansive canvas. Her palette ranges from the bold hues of sunset to the subtlest shades of blue and white, capturing the ocean both in moments of great violence and stillness.
This show celebrates the twentieth anniversary of her first solo show in 1979. She works in oil, pastel, pencil, gouache and occasionally ink or watercolor. Sizes of work range from six by six inches to forty by sixty inches. A full-time artist and Durham resident, Sneddon has attracted a large following up and down the Atlantic coast. She received her degree from Edinboro University in PA in 1975, and teaches a course for Duke University Continuing Education.
Artist Statement
"In the twenty years that have passed since my first one-person exhibition in 1979, I have been mindful of and thankful for my friends' and community's support. Those who know me are aware of my memory for visual details. We may have stood and talked on a street one day under a beautiful sky. Twenty years later I may paint that sky, remembering our conversation and mixing and brushing it all onto a canvas. I have shelves of sketchbooks and stacks of notes on grocery receipts, napkins and torn edges of paper table cloths from Shanghai restaurant.
I have been trying to find one of these documents of a time with Helen Whiting in front of Regulator Bookshop. My studio was once where the Java Cafe kitchen is now. I was walking up the alley with my rent check when I was stopped in my tracks by the most brilliant sunset. The mill building across the way had just been gutted and the sky could be seen straight through the glassless windows. Helen came back out with me from the bookshop and we stood and watched the colors become fire. That was 1984 or 85, when I had just started making a living at this. Where has the time gone? Where have some of our friends gone? I miss them. But maybe they aren't that far away. As Nan Sinclaire told me in a dream recently-- "I'll always be around . . ." As I sit here during my annual fall migration, looking out on Bogue Sound, I realize that it is true. Every time a mullet jumps, I can see Nan on that little beach saying, "Sue, you do not have a big fish in that net!" And I remember her squeal when I pulled the net out of the water with a 17" mullet. Richard Faughn and I said we would trade paintings someday. I think he held up his end of the bargain during a recent, bumpy flight from the northwest into RDU. As we broke through cumulus clouds, there it was--one of his paintings. Then there are those Todd Cull-kind-of-days . . .
I have studied currents in Bogue Sound, Calibogue Sound and in the San Juan Islands. A current in still water stirs something in me. It is similar to standing in reflecting wet sand at ocean's edge, drifting in my rubber boat on glassy water, flying through clouds, and floating to the surface in some clear water--between worlds. Standing on a cliff at Lopez Island in the San Juan islands studying a current, I began to realize one of the chords it strikes in me. Even when I am not applying paint to canvas, there is always a painting flowing through me."
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