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Art: Elizabeth Ann James, Columnist
January 2006

www.lizjamesartscene.blogspot.com

LIZ JAMES ART COLUMNS
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January 2006

Last month at Studios On High, I was impressed by the strong and vibrant paintings I saw when I first entered the gallery. Clay Sneller’s oil paintings will be featured at Studios through January 2006.

Although Sneller’s paintings don’t gleam in tech-bright colors and they’re not wildly “experimental,” their skilled minimalist aspect is first-class. In fact, they look so terrific on the wall, that Sneller – along with Jeff Hersey, Teda Theis, and Fran Mangino – will be showing work in February at Quest Art Gallery, the posh corporate gallery space at the southeast corner of Polaris.

The tall sandy-haired Sneller resembles an off-duty astronaut or a CEO in casual dress more than a prototypical artist. No black T-shirt or Warholian wigs for this guy. His aspect is calm, disciplined, and his paintings (calm, minimal) manage to express movement, even though they, like their creator, are solid, regular.

“It’s the shape that attracts me, and movement,” Sneller says. “Even when I’m watching football, I notice shapes moving through space. I use photographs, but usually the photographs are only a starting point and the painting becomes something different. I like structures, cities.”

Greek Orthodox Church From High Street by Clay Sneller

Greek Orthodox Church from High Street
This night painting shines, in more ways than one. Sneller varnishes many of his works. The much loved and familiar Greek Church takes up most of the space in this 24 x 18 inch painting. The massive domed structure has been painted in smooth soft oranges and dull yellows, except in the lower space where ground lights hit the wall and turn a section of it light yellow. Sneller knows composition, where to place each hue, and he’s the master of lines and angles. The white stripes on the parking lot run into the bluish line of the curb and set off this painting. The sky is a “Starry Night” blue, yet the “stars” have become two ephemeral crosses. Small lights (I imagine votives) glimmer like stars in windows near the dome. Again, near the curb, headlights shine beams and a pale triangle ignites a specific compositional space to the right. Sneller is not a “textural” painter – he doesn’t have to be.

The Battleship Building
Yes, Morning at the Battleship, 444 N Front St., also gleams. This is a pleasing, smooth, angular painting around 32 x 24 inches. Snow may or may not be falling in the painting; the morning may or may not be a foggy one, but Childe Hassam’s foggy blue light is present. Hassam, 1859–1935, an American impressionist, was known for his often-ethereal city scapes. Sneller’s two small trees are wispy. The gorgeous blue of the building dominates, yet gray light carves a small triangle on the left wall. A sketchy Columbus skyline is visible. Look carefully: two gray ghosts, workmen or CEOs, barely visible, lounge outside on the ground floor of the Battleship Building. The building with its vertical upward sweep emits gray blues. All in all, the building, its small cube windows, its dawn fogginess, presents a site which whispers of where we live, of universal interludes. Color has a sound. You may hear a buoy clang when you see Morning at the Battleship, which is the color of a battleship.

A Winnepeg Building
Morning in Winnepeg is serene, but the painting almost leaps out of the canvas. It’s austere, yet becomes a symphony of squares and colors. Sneller saw the building in Winnepeg and later captured its simple charm with his brush.

This is a moment; this is what I saw: The Winnepeg structure is not a high-rise; it’s “vintage,” likely a painted brick and at least two-stories. It resides in an obscure urban lot. The upper half is a bright red containing a smidgeon of lilac; the lower half a pale pink. This once nondescript building has three lavender “columns,” a lavender door. Tiny aquamarine triangles and a matching narrow border adorn the top of the building. All has been painted with exactitude, of course. There’s something, a blue plexiglass rectangle on the roof. Radar? A.C.? Solar panels? The street light curves to the right; it’s the one curve in the painting.

In this delicious scene, a meditational one, paint and lines create a pleasing compositional whole.

Morning at the Battleship by Clay Sneller

Corner Show and Nodding Off
Sneller’s Corner Show is around 16 by 24 inches. It’s vertical, and it epitomizes Sneller’s strength in expressing motion through solid structures. This painting is more imaginative than most paintings in the show. It waves, ripples, is a marvel of glass panels and flashing lights, and the straight-up office building leans toward us while sketchy, silhouetted urbanites walk briskly in and out. This painting, a nightscene, is a don’t miss. It’s a contemporary “Lullaby of Broadway.”

Clay Sneller sometimes starts with a charcoal drawing from imagination. In Nodding Off, now a large oil on canvas, one massive guy, white-haired yet bald, is seen in profile. He looks straight ahead, at a concert, perhaps, and becomes multiple images while his head drops lower and lower while he “nods off.” Here is a skillful concerto of whites, blacks, grays.

Influences
One of Sneller’s favorite artists is Marc Rothko (American, 1903–1970). Sneller appreciates “his abstracts, the layers of color. How layers of paint are applied loosely – but it comes out all right.” Richard Diebenkorn, (1922–1993), an American who used abstractionist skills in virtually kinetic urban scenes, also inspires Sneller.

Some observers have compared Sneller to Edward Hopper (American 1882–1967) because of Hopper’s fascination with towns and cities, shapes, lights, shadows. Solitary, sprawling human forms. Loneliness, isolation.

Sun Setting on Cotton Plant, Arkansas, in which a shabby storefront shelters two loiterers, suggests the sombre side of George Bellows, as well as the urbane side of Hopper. Sneller’s dusty window on Hasher’s Main St. Café has gone dark on a dark street in an actual town, Cotton Plant, Arkansas.

Clay Sneller is a professor at The Ohio State University in the Department of Horticulture and Crop Science, stationed in Wooster at the Ohio Agricultural Research and Development Center. He has a research appointment to study wheat and wheat genetics, his area of expertise.

He says that his academic field requires him to be precise and disciplined. He loves simplicity and shapes and motion, the motion implicit in light and angles. He refers, modestly, to his paintings as “a collection of shapes.”

Sneller lives with his wife and children in Wooster and has a large studio. “I’m lucky to have that space, and that makes it easier for me to spend three or four lengthy sessions a week painting.”

Sometimes Sneller finds that his creativity has taken him far afield. “These miniatures express my love for Africa, where I’ve never been. These were done from photographs, but they’re from my imagination too.”

There will likely be more miniatures in the January show. When I called during December, Sneller’s job had recently taken him to Australia.

Sneller states the he has always loved art and “was always drawing pictures” when he was a kid. Yet, he came to painting late. After putting his academic career first for ten years, he studied art at the University of Arkansas where he found his painting teacher, Ken Stokes, to be of profound influence.

Celebrate!
The 20th Anniversary Celebration at Studios on High will begin on Friday, Feb. 3, from 5 to 8 p.m, .and the artists, including alumnus artists, will be in attendance. Click on www.studiosonhigh.com to see what wonderful events are being planned or call 614-461-6487. Studios on High is at 686 N. High St.

Tapestries and Pop Art

Through January 8, the Columbus Cultural Arts Center presented Deborah Melton Anderson’s “The Fabric of Inspiration, Textiles Influencing Textiles.” The old Civil War armory at 139 West Main St. has long beamed art to the Columbus area. The big building is open every day of the week. Admission to exhibits is free; class fees are reasonable. This exhibit exemplified the highest standards possible for fabric art. Anderson’s painstaking and radiant “paintings” are worthy of space at the National Gallery of Art. For a personal response to the show, log on to lizjamesartscene.blogspot.com.

“Forged Souls, Weathered Soles,” by Brian Joiner will show at the Center beginning Jan. 15 through Feb. 19. Using Dorothy’s journey in The Wizard of Oz, Joiner deals with popular culture, ethical and political media messages “impacting the African American community in particular and society as it challenges the ordinary viewers’ perception of life, liberty, and justice.” Joiner and Dr. Floyd Thomas will present a gallery talk at a reception on Jan. 18.

Sounds like a wonderful prelude to Black History month.

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