{"id":22490,"date":"2013-09-05T12:32:01","date_gmt":"2013-09-05T18:32:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/?p=22490"},"modified":"2025-11-20T08:26:04","modified_gmt":"2025-11-20T15:26:04","slug":"final-light-the-life-and-art-of-v-douglas-snow","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/final-light-the-life-and-art-of-v-douglas-snow\/","title":{"rendered":"Final Light: The Life and Art of V. Douglas Snow"},"content":{"rendered":"
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When Doug Snow discussed having a book written about his work while sitting around the dinner table with friends one chilly October evening in 2009 \u2013 just three days before his death in a one-car collision at the age of 82 \u2014 Frank McEntire says all eyes turned to him. Later, when Snow\u2019s wife Susan suggested that McEntire seemed the person to do it, he immediately helped organize two memorial services and raised funds for an art scholarship, exhibition and book. A remarkable two-museum retrospective of the artist\u2019s work was launched. It couldn\u2019t have been handled by a better curator, a better art critic, a better friend. Now, some two years since those dual shows at the Utah Museum of Fine Arts and the then-Salt Lake Art Center (now UMOCA), there is, finally, a singular book, part of the same project, a collection of six essays commissioned and edited by McEntire that were written mainly by Snow\u2019s friends and former students. Centered on a large and satisfying collection of brilliantly colored reproductions of paintings from the 1950s to the mid-2000s,\u00a0Final Light: The Life and Art of V. Douglas Snow<\/em>\u00a0covers his childhood to his time at the University of Utah through his retirement years in his beloved Teasdale. It is arguably the most important and certainly the most anticipated art book to be published in Utah this year.<\/p>\n

The most essential pages are, of course, the color images and these are largely excellent. McEntire reports that the well-known artist and University of Utah Professor Emeritus Tony Smith, \u201cwho knows Doug\u2019s work better than anyone,\u201d helped him with the color proofs. \u201cWe felt images on the final printed pages are as accurate as can be had, given many of the separations were made from slides taken by Doug.\u201d Snow (and McEntire) had a terrific eye; only a very few reproductions seem merely photographic (e.g.\u00a0Stone Mountain,\u00a0<\/em>1977,\u00a0Light Walk<\/em>, 1984); the rest have a marvelous depth and texture that you can actually feel if you run your hand across a page.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s the perfect size for an art book, approximately 11\u2033 x 10\u2033, not too large to be unwieldy (it sits nicely on the lap) but large enough for images to reproduce satisfactorily and leave you wanting more than the 87 color photos it presents in its 192 pages.
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\nI get up in the morning primed to do something important, something urgent.\u00a0<\/strong>\u2013 V. Douglas Snow<\/p>\n

In her brief, intelligent foreword Mary Francey writes that the essays on the man, the art and the land \u201cnot only clarify meanings in his work; they also establish a solid foundation for Doug Snow\u2019s legacy, which rests at least partly in his reassurance that landscape is a timeless, enduring presence that effectively keeps pace with contemporary trends.\u201d Perhaps with a nod toward controversy surrounding the piece in the Utah Supreme Court, which the justices insist be covered during sessions, she says:\u00a0 \u201cThe murals, especially, are not benign backdrops but thought-provoking inhabitants of the spaces they occupy.\u201c<\/p>\n

In his introduction, McEntire tells us the original title of that mural, now called\u00a0Capitol Reef,<\/em>\u00a0was \u201cappropriately\u201d\u00a0Conflict and Resolution.\u00a0<\/em>\u201cA thunderstorm caught Snow on one of his hikes in Capitol Reef National Park while he was thinking about what to paint for the mural. He saw the storm as \u2018conflict.\u2019 Afterward \u2013 when the sun came out and the moisture on the hot sandstone vaporized \u2013 he saw it as \u2018resolution.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

Most of Snow\u2019s landscapes \u201cdraw their power\u201d from the Cockscomb, says McEntire, \u201ca huge, rugged serrated rock formation at the base of Wayne County\u2019s Boulder Mountain. This singular prominent feature in the sage- and juniper-covered terrain is continually shape-shifting, with seasonally endowed shafts of light, shadow, and mystery.\u201d Snow positioned his studio so he could see the formation: \u201c\u2018I could spend the rest of my life painting the Cockscomb,\u2019 he said. \u2018It would be my Mont Sainte Victoire,\u2019 a landmark that French impressionist Paul Cezanne repeatedly painted from his studio at the end of his life. . . .The Cockscomb motif is a key to understanding Snow\u2019s expressionist vision and is reflected in almost everything he painted \u2013 a nude, still life, ancient Italian ruins . . .\u201d<\/p>\n

We learn much about the artist\u2019s early life from McEntire, a fascinating exposition that tells us his mother was born not far from Capitol Reef but met and married a young soldier at the end of World War I, Vivian Douglas Snow, and moved to Salt Lake City with him. In the 1940s she would introduce her son and two daughters to southern Utah and they, Doug said, \u201cflipped for the place.\u201d Forty years later he built his studio and a home for his own family there.<\/p>\n

Snow attended the University of Utah, the American Artists School in New York and Columbia University, receiving his MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan. He studied in Italy as a Fulbright Scholar and would teach, mostly at the U of U, for nearly 40 years while he continued to paint.
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\nHe was one of those rare people who seem to belong wherever they happen to be.\u00a0\u00a0<\/strong>\u2013 Edward Lueders<\/p>\n

Author Ed Lueders tells us he first knew Snow in the mid-1960s when he joined the Department of English at the U. As department chairmen, he and Snow negotiated the student and faculty demonstrations of the Vietnam War era, a period the artist found quite wearing. Lueders, too, later built a home in Torrey and shared a number of the artist\u2019s interests there: the Wednesday table-tennis group, the Thursday afternoon Wayne County Chess Club, the Torrey\/Teasdale\/Grover short-story-reading group on the first and third Tuesday evenings of each month. He says that Snow loved operatic tenors and Gustav Mahler and had been a \u201cboy singer\u201d with local big bands \u2014 he still knew all the pop tunes from the 1940s.<\/p>\n

In the final analysis, all of us who come into contact with Doug\u2019s art are his students.\u00a0<\/strong>\u2013 Teresa Jordan<\/p>\n

In a delightful and telling essay, artist and author Teresa Jordan says: \u201cAlmost everyone who talks about Doug describes him as a romantic who loved beauty in all things \u2014 art, opera, language, design, and nature . . . He dressed with flair.\u201d She interviews noted artists who were once students of Snow and who recall revelatory things. \u201cI probably wouldn\u2019t be an artist at all if it hadn\u2019t been for Doug,\u201d says Tony Smith, \u201cbut I don\u2019t think he ever taught me how to do anything.\u201d Earl Jones adds: \u201cHe didn\u2019t teach us to put paint on or how to glaze. He never systematically taught the art of painting. It was purely an emotional thing for him. He provided inspiration.\u201d And Dave Dornan recalls: \u201cHe never talked about one of his own paintings as if he really knew what it was about. He wondered about it right along with you.\u201d<\/p>\n

That was evident when he was painting the mural in the Salt Lake City Library. Snow told filmmaker Claudia Sisemore for her 1977 documentary that a workman there asked him if he had submitted the low bid to get the job. He replied that he hadn\u2019t. \u201cBut they were suspicious until they saw that it was one hell of a lot of work, he said.\u201d Eventually, they began bringing their families in on weekends and explaining the mural to them, assuring them that it was getting better. \u201cWell, it wasn\u2019t really getting better; it was just that they were getting used to it. They were beginning to experience it,\u201d Snow said.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat\u2019s it . . . that\u2019s the one, Doug . . . that\u2019s . . . the one . . . I want.\u201d\u00a0<\/strong>\u2013Katie Lee<\/p>\n

Environmentalist, folk artist and author Katie Lee offers an evocative essay about, among other things, how she came to possess a Doug Snow painting titled\u00a0Final Light.\u00a0<\/em>(The artist was working on a different\u00a0Final Light<\/em>\u00a0when he died.)\u00a0 It\u2019s a charming recollection about an honest, enviable decades-long friendship (with some behind-closed-doors insights into the artist) and a treatise on what really should motivate us to acquire a piece of art.<\/p>\n

If Snow did not fully understand the implications of abstraction in the 1950s (and who did?) . . . he deduced one important thing: abstraction and realism were not inconsistent.<\/strong>\u00a0This may seem an ideological commonplace now, but then it was not.\u00a0<\/strong>\u2013 Will South<\/p>\n

In \u201cSeeing Snow,\u201d artist and author Will South, chief curator for the Columbia Museum of Art in South Carolina, brings us an invaluable and very readable art historian\u2019s perspective on the painter\u2019s work. He begins with\u00a0 artists Albert Bierstadt and Thomas Moran, in whose hands \u201cthe American West became like the East, only larger and vastly more dramatic,\u201d then takes us to Utah where \u201cseeing nature as evidence of a perfect but inscrutable divine plan was well established . . . through the capable paintings of H.L.A. Culmer and J.T. Harwood, among others.\u201d The rise of tonalist and impressionist landscape painting gave us \u201cthe twentieth-century Utah artist who best represents a blend of romantic realism with a slightly impressionistic bent,\u201d and \u201cwho squeezed poetry out of visions of the most modest, poplar-lined Utah town\u201d \u2014 LeConte Stewart, who would teach young Doug Snow at the University of Utah. South explains that Snow understood earlier landscape painting well but did not \u201cbegin and end a painting with literal transcriptions of what he saw.\u201d Influenced by abstract expressionism from very early in his career, Snow\u2019s work, South says, \u201cis a visual and visceral self-examination as much as a record of geological processes . . . His approach, from the 1950s forward, was not to make pictures of things, but rather to make his art an extension of himself into a world of things.\u201d
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\nDoug Snow\u2019s physical studio . . . to paraphrase Bachelard\u2019s words \u2013 sheltered his daydreaming. . . . allowed him to dream in peace. . . . But his sense of place, as potential, as religious, as surprising and mysterious and dangerous and a source of sudden beauty \u2013 was much larger.\u00a0 \u2014<\/strong>David Kranes<\/p>\n

Author and playwright David Kranes addresses the topic of place in the art of Doug Snow in a haunting and lyrical essay. Home, he says \u201conly, finally becomes home if the blank sheet of paper bears words, if the empty stretch of canvas bears color, line, and shape.\u201d He reminds us of the work of Gaston Bachelard, whose\u00a0The Poetics of Space\u00a0<\/em>\u201cstands toe-to-toe with such questions\u201d as \u201cWhere is the \u2018house\u2019 of our best imaginings, our most possible art?\u201d But for him, Kranes says, \u201cthe power and mystery of space have always been true. I feel space on my skin.\u201d He tells us, interestingly, that Snow was both an actor, in his youth, and a playwright in his later years, and describes in detail the artist\u2019s two-act play,\u00a0Blind Sight,<\/em>\u00a0set in New York City, Utah\u2019s Salt Flats and redrock country. And Kranes concludes that Snow, too, carried place on his skin. \u201cYou cannot hide; your art will find you. Place is weather and light; it\u2019s the music of time and the voices of ghosts.\u201d<\/p>\n

For an artist who lived in and painted a desert landscape, the prevalence of storms in Snow\u2019s work may appear incongruous, but it is precisely the desert dweller who pays the most attention to the weather. \u2013<\/strong>Shawn Rossiter<\/p>\n

In his essay, \u201cDrama of the Land,\u201d artist and arts magazine editor Shawn Rossiter writes familiarly and resonantly about \u201ca landscape that must be lived to be believed\u201d and tells us briefly how Snow brought the New York School of painting to Utah. In Snow\u2019s early works, he says, \u201ca 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 . . . frequently created by masking a heavily worked substrate\u201d (something he suggests Snow may have picked up by looking at Jackson Pollock\u2019s\u00a0She Wolf<\/em>\u00a0at the Museum of Modern Art).<\/p>\n

While some bits of information in the essays overlap, it\u2019s a thoughtfully and lovingly edited book, well worth making room for on your lap and on your shelf.<\/p>\n

Final Light: The Life and Art of V. Douglas Snow,<\/em>\u00a0edited and with an introduction by Frank McEntire, is published by the University of Utah Press (July 1, 2013). 192 pages. $26.95.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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