Jan Manton Gallery is pleased to debut Arryn Snowball in his latest exhibition i have had the privilege of seeing dawn and dusk bite through daylight hours on show from May 12 – 30 2021. Driven by a constant ‘open process’, his new works are injected with effervescent colour. Each piece is drenched in the ambiguity of both shared and personal nostalgia, of the fluidity of light and water and the elasticity of form and text.
This suite of paintings is an extension of his Slack Water series which began in 2017. The project emerged as a response to an abstract and visceral body of poems by Australian writer Nathan Shepherdson who reimagined pages found in the book Grant’s Guide to Fishes by Ern Grant.
Snowball paints with an open process, like a loose grid reminiscent of his net-like structures and elements which weave throughout the exhibition. The paintings are washed over in colours reflective of the ocean which produce undetermined images. For Snowball, they become an entanglement of memories reminiscent from his time spent as a kid fishing on the coast, on beaches and headlands.
“I paint simply, layering line over colour, colour over line, colour over colour. At some point, the painting becomes its own thing, able to hold itself up, something more than lines and colour,” writes Snowball. “When it starts to breathe, I stop. The finished paintings are rarely what I expect. It’s an open process, and can change at any point. If I get stuck, I look for more clues in the poem.”
