Stephen Snoddy During his precocious student years at Belfast College of Art, Stephen Snoddy never stopped painting. Driven by a powerful urge to explore and define his own vision of the world, this energetic young man produced an impressive body of work. It eventually ensured that he graduated with an MA in 1983, but within 4 years Snoddy put down his brushes. He did not pick them up again for over 20 years, and pursued instead a distinguished career as the director of maJor galleries across Britain. All the creative dynamism which had fuelled his youthful paintings became channelled into curating ambitious exhibitions and building collections. Then, quite suddenly, he experienced a mind-altering revelation. In 2012 his mother gave him a book (8 x 8) containing the series of 64 monoprints he had made way back in 1981 which had been produced serially over a few days. Monoprints differ from editioned prints in that only one impression is taken from a plate; reusing the plate for multiple unique prints allowed Snoddy to incorporate the erasures, palimpsests, and ghosts of previous explorations into subsequent work that became 8 sets of 8 monoprints. Leafing through these exuberant images, all of which had retained their original freshness, Snoddy felt overwhelmed and galvanised. The vision he had managed to develop as a student stirred his imagination once again. The sensuous monoprints made him determined to recover this creative impulse and pursue it further. So he began looking objectively back through slides of all his student paintings, rediscovering the sheer intensity which had driven him to produce such a prolific outpouring of early work. Through abstraction, the young Snoddy had searched for new forms and structures on paper and canvas alike. He had first decided to commit himself to art when his father, an art critic in Belfast, showed him an influential book called Private View. Written by Bryan Robertson and John Russell, with photographs by Lord Snowdon, this arrestingly illustrated volume of 1965 provided many insights into the dynamism of London as a burgeoning art capital. Snoddy’s father had plenty of other art books as well, and some of them contained key paintings by Henri Matisse from the First World War period. They played an immensely stimulating role in Snoddy’s development as an artist, and when visiting London he was able to relish the spectacular impact of Matisse’s outstanding late paper cut-out L’Escargot, on view in the Tate’s collection. The minimal slabs of colour dominating Brice Marden’s paintings also impressed Snoddy when he saw them in a solo exhibition at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in the summer of 1981. Nicholas Serota, the gallery’s director, praised Marden’s ability to use ‘his hard-won knowledge of the possibilities of the medium to introduce a new emotional range and new depth of feeling into his painting.’ Back in Belfast, the Ulster Museum had a very choice selection of American ‘Colour Field’ painters (rare in the UK at that time). Sam Francis, Joan Mitchell, Paul Jenkins, Kenneth Noland, Helen Frankenthaler and the Morris Louis Golden Age of 1959 left a lasting impression – as did the John Hoyland, 3:8:68 which Snoddy admired for its sympathetic and compelling conviction and engagement with colour, scale and abstract form. Always searching, Snoddy filled his student years with a fervent determination to discover new forms and structures which would enrich the language of abstract painting. He never stopped exploring, and felt a particular kinship with the approach adopted in early work by Hoyland, who declared in 1967: ‘The importance of process, the way the paint is put on, is constant. I cannot accept either the wholly conceptual or the purely fortuitous. It should be natural, like the way water flows, and if there is accident it must be controlled. There is the “finding” concept, also: to know from the outset the determining form, but to allow other things to filter in and flow. The painting must come to life in its own way, as a natural process. Temperament, process, and image all come together: you cannot use one without the others. That is why Rothko is such a marvellous artist: I cannot imagine him farming his work out to be executed.’ Looking back now on the work Snoddy produced as a student, anyone would feel puzzled by his abrupt decision to stop making art in 1987. The six large ‘frontal’ canvases he painted between October 1982 and March 1983 were especially successful, carrying over motifs from one work to the next and locking up the forms as if they were as tightly organised as wooden blocks. Perhaps he was too prolific at Art College, and ended up feeling burnt out by over-production and over experimentation. Whatever the reason, he successfully pushed aside the whole notion of being an artist until the momentous rediscovery of his student monoprints. Looking at them again in 2012 was tantamount to an epiphany. Here, at the age of 52, Snoddy knew that the time had come. The voyage of exploration which terminated when he was only 27 would now be recommenced. But how? The idea of starting with a blank canvas seemed difficult to overcome. So he realised that the student monoprints could play a crucial and integral role in enabling him to begin art-work all over again. After scanning them actual size with a computer, he placed these prints on specially prepared wood panels. He liked the blockiness of the boards, and it was easier to paste the paper onto their solid surfaces. Then he started painting on the paper with watercolour, acrylic and gouache. Since he had always painted in series at art school, Snoddy worked on eight small panels at the same time, the first set of 8 monoprints in the book. As a result, he found himself getting into the rhythm quite quickly, and by the summer of 2013 he felt ready to take on the challenge of working larger. Snoddy wants viewers to look at the relationships between his works, and how he carries lines and formats from one picture over to another. He sometimes regards two consecutive paintings as a diptych, with left and right-hand panels forming parts of a composite whole. There is an obsessive commitment to playing out endless permutations of specific forms and he goes along with an ontological methodology. The work becomes defined by its geometries, serial approach and limitless variations. In his own words, ‘The paintings often come in pairs or a small series and incorporate architec-tural and geometric structures with colour to get everything right – space, line, form. The final result is a balanced resolution made through corrections, revisions and re-workings.’ He also turns paintings around while working on them, deriving immense stimulus from gazing at different vantages. Although he alternates between vertical and horizontal compositions, and sometimes adds a diagonal alternative, 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.’ When Snoddy was a student, he often used acrylic and ended up, after a great deal of under-painting and reworking, with multiple layers of pigment on the canvas. Now, by contrast, he shies away from impasto of any kind, partly because the paint literally sinks into the paper and he deploys paint sparingly in washes. Above all, he aims at pulling the viewer into a vigorous engagement with his work on a formal level, entering into a dialogue with the history of the process of the painting. He says, ‘Often strips of colour serve as a counterpoint to a larger expanse of colour and through the reworking of the paintings glimpses of the decision making reveal themselves.’ Although Snoddy’s art is fundamentally abstract, it includes a fascinating range of references to the visible world. Architecture can be counted among them, partly because he sees himself building the internal scaffolding of his paintings as the work proceeds. His twin brother is an architect, and Snoddy has always taken a keen interest in the structure, proportion and materials of the buildings which engage his curiosity. He admires architects as progressive as Mies van der Rohe, Tadao Ando, Rafael Moneo and David Chipperfield, and he also responds to the architectural photographs taken by Lewis Baltz, whose black-and-white images of urban locations possess strong abstract qualities. Snoddy would never wish his own art to be seen as the work of a splashy abstractionist without control of the medium. He has always wanted his paintings to possess a strong internal order, and especially cherishes architecture imbued with a temple-like formality. Snoddy’s involvement with buildings is evident above all in his ongoing use of a window or a view through an opening. He routinely uses a ‘window’ template to paint an ongoing series in which the template is sometimes reversed (Pp.