EXPRESSIVE COLOUR
“I don’t paint every day,” Toby Snajdman says. “But when I am inspired I can paint for days and weeks, starting early afternoon to 1 a.m. I don’t even see the time go by.”
Snajdman is passionate about making art. The Hamilton artist has been painting and exhibiting in solo and group shows for more than 20 years. Her subjects, many and varied, include the human figure, landscape and still life. Her style is uniquely her own, loosely representational and characterized by expressive colour and emphatic line.
“I love to work with bright colours,” she explains. “This is what I envision and see. It brings joy and flows through my hands naturally as I paint.”
About 20 of her recent paintings and collages are on show at Gallery on the Bay.
Most of Snajdman’s human figures in this exhibition are head-andshoulder types. In “Fragility,” a woman, head to waist, appears in an interior setting with a window on the right that opens onto an architectural background.
“It is not meant to be a portrait,” Snajdman explains. “It is a woman deep in thought, contemplating, sad and praying.”
Snajdman contrasts the woman’s quiet inner self with a highly animated physical self. Her large head is tilted at 45 degrees to the frontal body, giving the composition a dramatic boost. This is where Snajdman excels.
She paints the hair as multicoloured undulating lines, each clearly delineated. The same kind of linear clarity appears in the Ushaped face. The face boasts big eyes and a long thin nose. The corners of the mouth are turned downward. All these facial features are enclosed within firm and confident lines. Snajdman adds a bit of glitter to each eye, making them sparkle.
The rest of the face is painted as a series of soft-edged shapes. A big blue shape dominates one side. Pinks and yellows fill rest of the face. A dab of orange enlivens the chin. So like many modernists before her, Snajdman uses the face as a space to be filled with an arrangement of colour, line and form.
The landscapes in this exhibition are complemented by buildings. “My Perfect World,” for instance, offers a careful balancing of architecture and nature. Flowers, bushes and one narrow building on the left take over the foreground. Water ripples in the midground. Houses, each one painted differently, crowd the area above the water. Trees and sky rise above them.
Snajdman excels in simplifying objects. Flowers become tiny curly shapes in purple and mauve, water a series of short, curvy horizontal lines with tiny white highlights. Trees consist of thick black lines for trunks and branches enclosed in green or violet foliage.
In “Still Life with Large Vase,” a vase and teacup are dwarfed by flowers so exuberant that they fill the space and look ready to burst out of the painting. Snajdman enriches the body of the vase with patterned papers.
“I paint from memory and imagination,” she says. “I get inspired by my faith in God, and by other things like flowers, children’s faces, angels’ faces and landscapes.”
Snajdman balances her art life with volunteer work. In May she will be receiving the Shem Tov Community Volunteer Award from the Hamilton Jewish Federation for her work at Shalom Village.
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Regina Haggo is teaching The XX Files, a six-week course exploring how famous women of the Bible and classical mythology have been represented in art through the ages. You can sign up for Monday or Friday afternoon classes. Classes start on Monday, April 16, and Friday, April 20. To register, phone the Dundas Valley School of Art, 905-6286357, or go to dvsa.ca.