V. Douglas Snow (1927-2009), Reprise, 1994, courtesy of Susan Snow and the Stremmel Gallery.

Doug Snow has been credited with bringing the New York School to Utah. While he was not the only artist to study the AbEx artists in situ and bring their techniques and outlook back with him, he was certainly one of the first; and, with the early recognition he garnered and the teaching position he held at the University of Utah, one of the most influential. Two years after his death, his long-time friend Frank McEntire has curated a retrospective exhibit of Snow’s work, installed in two Salt Lake City locations. At the UMFA, the vibrant colors and dynamic compositions of Snow’s canvases, dating from 1977 to 2004, hold their own in the expansive space of the museum’s Great Hall. The Salt Lake Art Center’s street level gallery provides a more intimate setting as well as a broader perspective: you are forced closer to the canvases so that they surround and overwhelm, while the chronology of the works begins with some of his early pieces from the 1950s and continues throughout his career, including the canvas left on his easel at the time of his death, now titled “Final Light: October ’09, 2009.”

What Snow learned in New York served him well for his long painting career, but it’s evident from this retrospective that the most powerful and enduring influence on the artist was the landscape of the West. In Snow’s early work, the mark-making techniques and compositional methods of the New York School — and their antecedents in Europe — are evident. These are the years when he discovered the expressive qualities of black, and when his hand learned a visual vocabulary that could be stretched and transformed to fit his needs. In these early works, a band of painterly activity strides across the center of the canvas, or comes rising up from the bottom to fill the painting. These spangled passages sit atop or are wedged in by more open bands of color. Sometimes the latter are previously applied grounds, but they are also frequently achieved by masking a heavily worked substrate (something he would have picked up looking at Pollock’s “She Wolf” at the MOMA) so that his process may have been a form of automatic drawing in which “random” marks were eventually developed into masses and forms by a process of exclusion. In later paintings these loops and scrawls take on more concrete forms, becoming masses of paint that coalesce into the imagery of the western landscape: folds, cliffs, fins, monoliths, rock falls, hoodoos, and hogbacks.

Snow’s work avoided the knitted picture plane that artists like de Kooning and Pollock inherited from the cubists. Form and ground remain separate in most of his work, and the horizon line, that most basic element of landscape painting, plays a dominant role: it can be an implied line, as in a magisterial block of forms that thrust themselves into the picture plane without entirely engulfing it; or a more explicit line, usually placed in dramatic positions — high like a looming canyon wall, or very low, evoking a lone line of rocks beneath a desert sky.

Study for Capitol Reef, M. Scott Matheson Courthouse Mural
1996
Oil on canvas
Collection of Cathy and Larry Bagley and The Torrey Gallery

As Snow’s works progressed and took on more overt aspects of the landscape, the bands of color that were once abstract grounds now become masses of sky and cloud, full of atmospheric drama. These color fields wash across or come crashing down on the crusty, intricately worked surfaces evoking ridges and canyons. For an artist who lived in and painted from a desert landscape the prevalence of storms in Snow’s work may appear incongruous, but it is precisely the desert dweller that pays the most attention to the weather. Moisture is desperately needed, but if it comes at the wrong time — when you’re hiking a slot canyon — it can be disastrous. The full palette of the desert comes alive in the brief moments when a storm saturates the stone and fauna and a shift of clouds dramatically lights a hillside or mesa.

Snow’s undergraduate studies at the University of Utah were in theater, and there is certainly something theatrical about his paintings.* His paintings can be violent and moody, majestic and thrilling; with their outrageous forms and stormy skies there is always something dramatic going on. For someone who’s never been to the west, Snow’s paintings may even seem like stage settings for imagined worlds — akin to the fantasies of the Surrealists, or the jagged rock formations the artists of the Lowlands inserted into their narrative paintings. But to anyone who has spent time in Rabbit Valley or the Waterpocket Fold, or stared for hours, as Snow did, at formations like the Cockscomb,|6| Snow’s paintings are masterful evocations of a landscape that must be lived in to be believed.

V. Douglas Snow, “Cove Desert Floor,” 1989, Oil on canvas, Collection of Tina Martin

Douglas Snow, Cockscomb Near Teasdale, 1985, courtesy the Springville Museum of Art collection, 1989

Final Light: V. Douglas Snow In Retrospect is at the Utah Museum of Fine Arts and the Salt Lake Art Center through October 22.

Shawn Rossiter

The founder of Artists of Utah and editor of its online magazine, 15 Bytes, Shawn Rossiter has undergraduate degrees in English, French and Italian Literature and studied Comparative Literature in graduate school before pursuing a career in art.